Unless you happen to be an architecture buff or a historian, you’ve probably never heard of the Sears Modern Homes catalog houses that an estimated 75,000 Americans bought between 1908 and 1940. By the late 1920s, do-it-yourself houses ordered from a catalog lined the streets of such new suburbs as Kirkwood, Webster Groves and Ferguson. Today, metro St. Louis alone has some 300 identified Sears houses, including the 192 built by Standard Oil for its employees in Carlinville, Wood River and Standard City, Ill., in what is the largest cluster in the United States.
It turns out that most current Sears-house owners aren’t even aware of their homes’ origins. Alton-based historian and writer Rosemary Thornton has been scouring the Midwest and Northeast in search of Sears houses and their owners since the late 1990s. I’ve read her book The Houses That Sears Built: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Sears Catalog Homes and heard tales of her house-detective work. Now I want to meet the Miss Marple of Sears houses, a woman who has located some 3,000 of these gems and memorized each of the 370 house designs featured in the catalogs.
One foggy July morning, I meet Thornton for breakfast at a Denny’s in Creve Coeur. She brings a 1930 Sears house catalog, a shipping label and a block of wood from a house beam. Eager to share her knowledge with a novice, she agrees to demonstrate her sleuthing techniques on a drive through Kirkwood and Webster Groves. “The best candidates are in communities like these with access to railroad stations,” she tells me over pancakes and scrambled eggs, “because all the house kits were transported by train.”
In the early 20th century, catalog homes from Sears, Roebuck & Co., Montgomery Ward and their lesser-known competitors Aladdin, Gordon–Van Tine and Harris Brothers, opened the door to suburban homeownership for families with limited income. Following the popular house styles of the period, catalog houses (also called “kit” or “precut” houses) looked just like the neighbors’ architect-designed homes—but by ordering the parts from a catalog, hauling them from the train station to the building site and assembling the house themselves, a family could own a new suburban house at a third of the going price. Sears’ no-money-down mortgage (offered from 1911 to 1933, except for a three-year break) helped seal the deal. For African Americans, immigrants and single women, all of whom faced redlining well into the 1960s, a catalog home offered entrée into the housing market.
When Sears published its first Book of Modern Homes and Building Plans in 1908, a prospective homeowner could pore over 44 pages of house descriptions with illustrations and floor plans for 22 house styles, priced from $650 to $2,500. Each style was assigned a number. Ten years later, clever marketing prevailed and Sears began using romantic names like Winona, Olivia, Chatham, Del Ray, Windermere and Magnolia instead. The 1910 catalog featured gas and electric light fixtures and offered 80 “modern styles of dwellings” for “farm homes, country, town and city residences, cottages, roomy houses, flat buildings and bungalows.”
The ads promised an easy-to-assemble house that a “man of average ability” could finish in 90 days. That backbreaking timetable got a boost in 1914, when the kits started including “ready-cut” lumber, each piece labeled for easy installation. Owners could still opt to buy their own lumber and saw it themselves, but, in those days before power saws, Sears’ precut lumber must have been hard to turn down. “Electric saws and the heavy-duty wiring to handle the amperage draw were a thing of the future,” Thornton reminds me. “Imagine someone pressing a handsaw into your hands and pointing you toward 620 pieces of lumber.”
The Sears, Roebuck & Co. Modern Homes catalogs published from 1908 to 1940 offer a mountain of information for house researchers. Stuffed with page after page of house drawings and floor plans, floor-by-floor descriptions for every room, interior and exterior design details and a breakdown of costs, they reveal the geometry of American living spaces in the early and mid-20th century.
Sears was not the first American company to sell assemble-it-yourself houses from a catalog. Montgomery Ward, the Hodgson Co. and Aladdin Homes beat the catalog giant by at least 10 years, but Sears sold the largest number for which we have evidence. “The name, ‘Sears house,’ is easy to remember,” writes Elgin, Ill., architectural consultant and catalog-house expert Rebecca Hunter in the 2004 reference manual Putting Sears Homes on the Map. “‘The world’s largest store’ is still a presence in the economic realm.” Between its iconic name and the survival of the Modern Homes catalogs, Sears has developed a reputation as the Xerox of catalog houses.
The Sears Modern Homes catalogs make for fascinating reading. Each page is a window into the company’s marketing savvy, stressing quality, affordability and satisfied customers. “My wife and I, who are nearing 60 years, built the house [a Clyde] ourselves, and we saved about $1,300,” wrote W.E. O’Neil of Wamego, Kan., in a testimonial. From Clarence J. Parker of Dearborn, Mich.: “We are well satisfied with our ‘Osborne’ house. The material is as good as can be got anywhere and way above the average.”
To maintain that quality and keep lumber prices competitive, Sears ran three lumber mills, including a sprawling 40-acre plant in Cairo, Ill., operating from 1911 to 1940 “to serve the great Midwest and South.” The catalog assured readers that “the lumber furnished is bright and new, fine dry Douglas Fir Pacific Coast Hemlock for framing, Cypress for outside finish, the wood that lasts for centuries.” For the design-impaired, Sears’ “Architects’ Council,” including a “woman advisor who understands the requirements of the housewife,” was available for a no-fee consultation.
After choosing their dream house from the catalog, hopeful homeowners sent in an information form and $1 in exchange for a bill of materials, a set of blueprints and a detailed cost breakdown. By the late 1920s, they could also visit one of more than 60 urban showrooms in the East and Midwest, including St. Louis’ own Modern Homes sales office at Eighth and Olive. Sears encouraged customers to “individualize” their homes with reverse floor plans or even their own floor plans. Customers could even substitute brick for Sears’ traditional wood framing.
About two weeks after an order was placed, the house—or, rather, some 3,000 house parts, packed in two boxcars—arrived at the nearest train station. Besides the precut lumber with all the required joists, rafters and studs, the kit contained 760 pounds of nails, 10 pounds of wood putty, 27 gallons of paint and varnish, 460 pounds of window weights, 72 coat hooks, 27 windows, 25 doors and one doorbell. Masonry was not included, and Sears’ own bathtubs, sinks, screen doors, plumbing, heating, wiring and electric fixtures counted as “extras.”
“The parts were packed sardine-style, with not an inch to spare,” explains Thornton, “so that the pieces needed first were at the bottom.” Once the boxcar was moved to a siding, the owner had 24 or 48 hours to inventory and remove the contents. As late as the 1930s, most people used a horse-drawn wagon to transport the parts from the train station to the building site. With the help of relatives, neighbors and friends, families built their dream homes piece by piece. By the late 1920s, some customers had begun to hire contractors or sign on for a handpicked one from Sears. As an incentive during the Depression, customers who assembled their own houses got labor credit on the down payment.
“A St. Louis sales office is a good sign that there must be more Sears houses in this area waiting to be discovered,” Thornton assures me. In addition to the Standard Oil employees’ houses, so far she has identified some 100 Sears houses in Metro East, with the largest clusters in Alton and Wood River. On the Missouri side, Kirkwood tops out with 25, followed by eight each in Webster Groves and Ferguson.
After breakfast, we squeeze into my car and head to Kirkwood. For the next three hours we drive up and down, round and around, through Kirkwood and Webster Groves, as Thornton points at possible Sears houses, almost Sears houses, Sears-house look-alikes and the real McCoy.
She points out a “grand old house” in Webster. “See the stained-glass windows? Those camphor corners? Isn’t that a beauty?” She has brought along her well-worn copy of the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s Houses by Mail: A Guide to Houses from Sears, Roebuck and Company so we can compare the Sears-catalog illustrations with their 21st-century incarnations.
With her startling visual memory, Thornton hardly needs the book for reference. But for an unseasoned house detective who can’t tell a Winona from the other Craftsman-style houses on the block, Houses by Mail is a necessary crutch.
As we drive down Woodbine, Thornton signals me to stop. “That looks like a Crafton!” she shouts, rolling down the window and pointing to a one-story bungalow. “Check out those five faux beams. They need to know it may be a Sears house before they start remodeling.”
It doesn’t take long for me to figure out why Thornton’s friends call her the “house whisperer.” Without so much as a street map, she can seemingly sense an undiscovered Sears house in the vicinity. We circle the blocks closest to the train station as Thornton looks for clues—double-arch entries, a slope over the front door, a tiny closet window, French windows, cutout shutters, a triangle above the window. She knows exactly where she’s going. “Turn right—no, left. I know it’s around here somewhere. There it is! A Wilmore! But look how they turned it sideways.” She grabs Houses by Mail and points to an illustration of a 1930s house with a steep roof and circle-head door. I can hardly tell that it’s the same house.
Ten minutes later, she asks me to stop in front of a house that reminds me of ones I’ve seen in Pasadena, Calif.: “Look at that! I’ve never seen one of these in St. Louis! I think it’s a Del Ray.” We get out of the car to take a closer look. “The porch is a little wide,” she says, “but those French windows almost seal the deal.” As we stand staring at the house, a car pulls into the driveway and a woman steps out and walks inside. By now Thornton is used to people slamming doors in her face or even grimacing at the words “catalog house.” But I don’t want to pass up a chance to witness her interior detective work, so Thornton agrees to give it a try.
Luckily, the woman has read all about Thornton, and she invites us in. We tiptoe past her son, fast asleep on the couch, and head for the basement. At Thornton’s direction, we check the wooden beams and baseboard trim for blue or yellow house-identifying numbers. No luck. But Thornton isn’t discouraged. Back on the first floor, she checks the room dimensions, windows, planking and door mirrors. Encouraged, she gives the woman a copy of Finding the Houses That Sears Built. She also urges her to keep looking for “number 306 on those basement beams” and says, “Try to locate the mortgage records.”
In the 1920s, as working- and middle-class families moved into communities such as Kirkwood, catalog houses were hot. By the end of the decade, Sears’ house-kit sales peaked at more than 12 million. The Cairo, Ill., plant alone shipped, on average, 250 kits a month. Except for a two-year hiatus, sales continued through the Depression, but without the generous mortgages. The company that prided itself on affordability called in thousands of customer loans. In 1940, Sears published its last Modern Homes catalog, closing a chapter on American vernacular architecture.
With additional research by Bernet S. Bai.
Catalog-House Sleuthing 101
Think you own a Sears house? Get ready for some serious detective work. For starters, Sears didn’t save any sales records. And, like all catalog houses, Sears houses look like other houses from the same era. Extensive remodeling (aluminum siding, ripped-out porches, new windows, torn-off shutters, etc.) can hide key details. For guidance, check out the sources below.
House-Detective Tools
Houses by Mail: A Guide to Houses from Sears, Roebuck and Company, by Katherine Cole Stevenson and H. Ward Jandl (John Wiley & Sons/Preservation Press, 1986)
Sears online archives (www.searsarchives.com/homes)
The Houses That Sears Built: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Sears Catalog Homes, by Rosemary Thornton (Gentle Beam Publications, www.gentlebeampublications.com, www.searshomes.org, 2002; contact the author at rosethornton@charter.net)
Finding the Houses That Sears Built: A Guide to the 60 Most Popular Designs, by Rosemary Thornton (Gentle Beam Publications, www.gentlebeampublications.com, www.searshomes.org, 2004)
Putting Sears Homes on the Map: A Compilation of Testimonials From Sears Modern Homes Catalogs, 1908-1940, by Rebecca Hunter (R.L. Hunter Press, 847-697-4551, 2004)
Sears House-Catalog Reprints
Small Houses of the Twenties: The Sears, Roebuck 1926 House Catalog (The Athenaeum of Philadelphia and Dover Publications, store.doverpublications.com, 1991)
Sears House Designs of the Thirties (Dover Publications, store.doverpublications.com, 2003)
Sears, Roebuck Book of Barns: A Reprint of the 1919 Catalog, Rebecca Hunter and Dale Patrick Wolicki, editors (R.L. Hunter Press, 847-697-4551, 2005)
Homes in a Box: Modern Homes from Sears Roebuck (Schiffer Publishing, 1998)
