national database of sears homes

But before all this, having to get your own home built was more common instead of getting on a waitlist for a HUD-subsidized tract home or buying one secondhand from the current occupant. I think the reason the Sears house is so interesting is that most people associate them with the Wish Book catalog that came in the mail at Christmas. However, the streets that are lined with these farmhouse models (and many other houses), are actually in the Lakeview neighborhood so, we imagine that was a mistake in the article. Our home also resembles the Bedford Model # P3249, 1926 (this was not in your listings). Between 1908 and 1940, Sears Roebuck and Co. published specialty catalogs offering house plans and building materials. Normajean Moser of McCandless owns a Walton model that was purchased from the Sears Modern Home catalog. , in addition to Aladdin and Montgomery Ward homes. Some of the most popular models were:[12], The largest and one of the most expensive Sears models was the Magnolia. Many of these post 1940 homes were based on models from the 1940 and earlier Sears catalogs but not all were, leading to debate over whether these homes qualify as "Sears Modern Homes". Sears, Roebuck and Company's Modern Homes program began in 1908 and ended in 1940. While the vast majority of models were for single-family house designs, Sears offered some duplex house designs and even a few larger multiple-family buildings. Many of the famous designs were commandeered from other sources and/or purchased from architects but given just enough change to be advertised as their own. Sears Lewiston: A Sears Model Home in New Jersey - Sears House Seeker Asbury Methodist Village Communications Dept. 110 (, 1524 2nd Street, La Porte, Indiana earliest version of the Sears No. Images are available Betcone spoke of how housing styles were drastically changing and how many customers wanted more efficient, streamlined designs. During the Modern Homes program, large quantities of asphalt shingles became available. Browse the list below to see if there are Modern Homes in your Instead, shipping labels were affixed to the backside of trim that identified properties. As I detailed in the account of the rise and fall of the Sears empire, this literally led them to become the largest retailer in America because they had so many burners going at onceand their Modern Homes kits, and even the home buying process itself, were part of that in addition to catalog and retail sales. Search crews have rescued Californians stranded for days in multiple feet of snow after back-to-back storms plastered the state's mountain communities and trapped many in their homes. Thousands of developments in cities, suburbs, and exurbs have sprung up since with a seemingly endless amount of homes that were built between World War II and today. So, each house that we find through these records, represents a great deal of digging, and lots of amassed knowledge in how to attack the task because each county's records system is a little different than others. Marie gives the perfect explanation of our Sears House hunt, in this. Theres a whole checklist of signs to look for. Chabot notes that Sears mail-order homes sold before 1916 did not use precut lumber that was stamped with numbers to guide construction. [16], There was no single architect for the Sears designs. Hi, Lauren! Sears Magnolia was also known as Model #2089. contacting them by clicking on their name. Simple theme. 506 W 11th Street, La Porte, Indiana probable Sears No. Sears houses could also be ordered with reversed floor plans. Our national database of Sears houses in the U.S. has over 13,600 homes on it, and, after Ohio and Illinois, Pennsylvania is #3 in U.S. states with, at today's count, 1,963 Sears homes found. Compare that to about 330 million people today. Orders were placed by mail, the See more 5,581 people like this 5,890 people follow this https://www.searshouses.com/ cyn.catanzaro@gmail.com Many of the smaller models are regularly torn down. The last Sears Modern Homes catalog was issued in 1940. Designs may have been modified but generally should match in layout and dimensions. , something that piqued my interest was the idea that you could buy literal houses from the catalog. You can clearly see a major difference on this side of the houses. And Sears Modern Homes werent a monolith. Sears Modern Homes - Home | Facebook We thought it might be of interest to those readers to point out some more of the history of Sears houses in the greater Pittsburgh area, said Chabot, whose family still owns a Sears Silverdale model home in Northampton, Mass., that was built by her great-grandparents in 1911. Powered by, Table of Sears Houses in La Porte, Indiana. Buyers could hire a contractor to assemble their home or build it themselves following the detailed instructions that were included. Welcome to Sears Homes! But, as of this date in 2021, here are leading areas in the U.S. with high numbers of Sears houses. 181, Sears No. Thank you for visiting! My daughter and son-in-law have a 1924 Homeville in Abington! The. Residential construction was drastically down nationwide due to the Great Depression. Or, perhaps we have background information about it to share with you!Judith. We scour real estate listings, we "drive" around streets (using Google maps Streetview) in towns with a concentration of homes of the era, and we especially love researching, using primary sources such as historic newspapers and the old mortgage and deed resources held in each town's Register of Deeds office, looking for houses that were financed through Sears. Thanks to the Santa Clara Valley Chapter of the California Native Plant Society, the NRDB will continue to be updated and available at least through 2023, and in some form, beyond that. 168 (Matoka): Here is the catalog image of the No. Among those chiming in about the article was Judith Chabot of St. Louis, Mo., who runs SearsHouseSeekers.com, which serves as a depository for information gathered by Sears home enthusiasts across the country. Its kind of exciting to learn that your home is unique because of the way it was bought and constructed, she said. In the companys own words, Sears didnt really innovate home building. Other models only appeared for one year. It looks almost like a Sears, And, finally, we have this pretty rare model, the Sears. It's also possible that some local builder just put together a similar design, to compete with the Sears houses being built in town, but, some of these examples are on blocks of streets that are lined with Sears houses from this early spec offering by Sears. We have a database of all the models that have been identified nationwide to date. June 1, 2022. by etc north vernon covid testing. In addition to home building costs being up to 40% lower than traditional building, you also had the option to bring your own blueprints to Sears to get them modified for far less than itd comparatively cost to go to a builder or architect today. The original "Sears Modern Homes" community page on Facebook, for those interested in Sears homes. More information, in this blog post of mine, documented through historic mortgage research, by Andrew Mutch, Philadelphia Inquirer article by Kevin Riordan, 418 Woodlawn Ave, Collingswood, NJ 08108, USA, Catalogs Online: Sears, Radford, Gordon-Van Tine, Sears Starlight (Sears Homes of Chicagoland), Sears Door Hardware: La Tosca, Shefton, Rhythmic, ONLINE CATALOGS on Archive.org: Sears, GVT, Radford +more. I'm currently working my way through the Burlington County records, but they are limited, and set up in a way that makes the process very time consuming. We certainly imagine that the houses have been retro-fitted with one, at this point. The kit was greatly modified by Lane's ambitious designs. Because lets get real: affordable ranchers were only for CERTAIN veterans, Government spending was dedicated to housing in an unprecedented manner as the mantra was driven home that the ideal was a nuclear family in a 3-bedroom. 172, later marketed as the. This is the case for the southern New Jersey counties that are suburbs of Philadelphia. Sears has opened the doors to its vast archival collection and invited the public to peek inside. Primarily shipped via railroad boxcars, these kits included most of the materials needed to build a house. Moreover, it was just more feasible to plunk down a house somewhere because there just werent as many homes on account of a smaller population. We love her for giving us this to quote over and over again and for the many Sears houses that she has added to our list. Modest half-timbering in the gables, exposed rafters, knee braces, and gable-end ridge finials combine to create an optimistic facade. to you on Flickr or Pinterest. Shipping label image from my mother's family's 1911 Sears No. While I'm at it, I'll tell you a bit about our mission, as a research team. According to Betcone, the two models that were the top sellers for Sears in 1930 totaled just over 100 houses a year. Historic Homes Images of Sears Homes Click on the associated link for a collection of images and photographs of almost all 447 house designs sold through the Sears Modern Homes program. After several years, Sears also began assigning names to the various models. Sears discontinued its Modern Homes catalog after 1940, though sales through local sales offices continued into 1942. Marie's great-grandfather, Freeman Pretzinger, built this Sears. [7] Early mortgage loans were typically for 5 to 15 years at 6% to 7% interest. 175 (in 1913). Open to the public. How do we know another house didn't outsell the Argyle after 1931? None of these houses are authenticated through mortgage or deed research, but they are spot-on matches for the models, and we feel certain enough of their origin, to add them to our database. Cindy's research in Delaware County, coupled with my research in Montgomery County, netted at least 200 hundred authenticated houses, but that research was preceded by many hours of searching the streets of Willow Grove, Glenside, and other suburbs, by Karen, Nigel, Sarah, Marie, and Andrew. Another gabled ell farmhouse that we found quite a few of in La Porte, is the No. No built examples have been found of some of the least popular models. The American Lumberman article referred to this area where the houses were being built, as the Fairview neighborhood. I considered putting a full chart here, but, honestly, we have found hundreds through searching the suburban PA counties outside of Philadelphia. This is what these two models look like, in the catalogs (these are from the 1911/1912 catalog): Up until this point, we weren't really sure what the difference was between these two models. New models were introduced every year, and some only stuck around for a couple years. In many cases, we may be able to tell you of homes in your town, that have actually been authenticated as Sears homes, and, in some cases, we may be able to tell you that the house in question is a kit house from another company (consider, , All photos in these blog posts are the property of the author of this blog- link to this blog. Lara was joined by researcher Cindy Catanzaro, who researches especially in Ohio, and writes the blog. PDF See the video of my interview on the St. Louis Business Journal's website. CNDDB Maps and Data - California Department of Fish and Wildlife excited about this find and I really hope it is one: a Sears No. But it was a different story when Sears began selling house building kits in 1908. Tailor the data to your community to help preserve your local assets or explore national data to better understand the need for affordable housing and the dynamics of the publicly supported housing market. [6] Plumbing, electrical fixtures, and heating systems were options that could be ordered at additional cost; they were many families' first steps to modern HVAC systems, kitchens, and bathrooms. However, these stamps were not used on lumber shipped before 1916, when Sears first started offering pre-cut lumber. Thanks to Ancestry.com, we are often able to get a street name from a census record, but we run into problems there, when we find a town that has no street names (yes! But at the time, there was a housing boom taking place as people wanted to escape the crowds and disease of the cities. But articles are so scattered by time, date and location that it is difficult to realize the scope and number of Sears homes here in the Pittsburgh area.. It's highly improbable that any model could hit the 1,700 mark. 4120 Adams St., Gary, IN. Images are available 171's porch roof (when it is a partial porch) connects to the house far to the right side of that upper window and then has a wedge-shape side part to that roof, so that both models end the porch just to the edge of the front door, but with a very different treatment to the shape of the porch roof there. They had 447 different styles that ranged from simple and rustic to utterly decadent. Once delivered, many of these houses were assembled by the new homeowner, relatives, friends and neighbors, in a fashion similar to the traditional barn-raisings of farming families. Sears's use of "balloon style" framing systems did not require a team of skilled carpenters, as did previous methods. Compare house designs to original catalog images. I'm sure it was Matthew who cleared up for me that the No. This means that information about the Modern Homes department is scarce. According to the US Census, there were about 88.7 million people living in the United States. that was $886 in 1940 dollars, about $16,000 today. Originally marketed as the. Many of these homes were built in Sears planned "Home Club Plan" developments in New Jersey, New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania.[9][10][11]. We maintain the National Database of Sears Houses in the U.S., where we add new finds, almost daily. This one, too, looks pretty much like just a taller version of the Greenview/115 and the Rossville/171, from the front and porch side of the house so, it was another mystery, as to what to look for on the other side of the house. We soon realized that she had a keen eye for Sears houses (and a keen love for them, as her great-grandfather had built a Sears Martha Washington in Oakwood, Ohio), and she joined our research group. Harbst said it wasnt until after she bought the house that she learned homes were once sold through mail-order catalogs. If my house is not a kit, where did it come from? In it, they included excerpts from an interview with David S. Betcone, who was the chief architect for Sears at the time. Its not like nowadays where you move, wait for your stuff to arrive, and if youre a work-at-home like me, youre pretty much unable to work while you wait for a technician to ensure you have Internet access. I think teardowns are the reason that Argyles are not positioned higher in our national database of Sears homes (the Argyle comes in at number 20). I believe my parents were the 3rd owners purchasing the house in 1965 or 1966. A recent Tribune-Review story about a 1922 Sears mail-order home in McCandless that has most of its original features intact drew scores of letters and comments from Pittsburgh area residents interested in learning more about the unique role these houses played in U.S. history. We also find street names that have changed (without our knowing that), or, especially for folks who bought their house in 1930-32 (the waning years of the mortgage program), we find that folks lost their homes during the depression, so we can't pin them down using the 1930 or 1940 census records. Not all Sears houses were mortgaged through Sears, but many were, so it's a great help for us to be able to access those records. Lara and Cindy were joined by Andrew Mutch, who is based out of his own Sears house, in Novi, Michigan. As its mail-order catalogs were already sent to millions of homes, Sears had a distinct advantage over other kit-home competitors. This Sears mail-order kit home in McCandless is owned by Normajean Moser. Text information is available through RareFind 5 and provides essential information about special status species and occurrences. There are examples of modern homes built based on the design of Sears Modern Home. We saw that on numerous Rossville/No. Years later, the sales records related to home sales were destroyed during a corporate house cleaning. If you are a Historical Society interested in awarding plaques for specific homes understood to be Sears houses, please feel free to contact us to verify for you that the house does match a model offered in the Sears Modern Homes catalogs.

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