Robert and Rose Annette Mason of Elgin had heard that their house, which they bought in 1951 from Rose Annette’s uncle Dr. Herbert Pillinger, was one of more than 100,000 kit homes purchased from Sears, Roebuck and Co. catalogs from 1908 to 1940.
“But we never gave it much thought,” says Rose Annette. “To us, it was just a house.’
Enter Rebecca Hunter of Elgin. She has been directed by the Elgin Heritage Commission, a citizen’s advisory board, to catalog the city’s Sears houses. The project nearly complete, Hunter has located 204 Sears homes in Elgin so far. They represent 70 of Sears’ 450 models.
After other Sears homeowners urged her to check out “Doc Pillinger’s house,” she contacted the Masons.
“Turns out, it is a mystery house,” Hunter says. Although Hunter located many of Elgin’s Sears houses easily by matching them to photographs in the Sears house lovers’ bible, “Houses By Mail” (The Preservation Press, $24.95), by Katherine Cole Stevenson and H. Ward Jandl, the Masons’ home took some sleuthing.
The blueprints, which the Masons found stashed in a closet, don’t say “Sears” or “Honor Bilt,” the Sears’ brand name, but they have the same architects’ signature box that appears on the plans of other Sears houses. The radiators are stamped with “SARCO” (Sears and Roebuck Co.) and the hardware matches that in the catalogs. Rose Annette’s cousin, who grew up there, remembers going with his father to a Sears office to make payments. And the house is about a mile away from a former railroad depot, typical for Sears homes, which were delivered, unassembled, in boxcars.
Hunter’s conclusion: “The Masons’ house was built from a custom design or it is a modification of a catalog house. The floor plan resembles the Glen Falls model. In those days, you could work with Sears architects to alter their plans at their Home Sales offices.”
The Masons’ house is larger and more detailed than most of Elgin’s Sears houses. Loaded with built-ins including bunk beds, bookcases and china cabinets, the charming, stone-and-timber home has changed little since it was built in 1931. Except for remodeling the kitchen, the Masons have preserved it.
Though Elgin is just now documenting Sears homes, it was the location of one of the 48 Sears offices that dotted the country in 1930, all east of the Mississippi River and north of the Mason-Dixon Line.
Although several companies made kit homes in the early 20th Century, including J.C. Penney Co., Montgomery Ward & Co. and the now-defunct Aladdin Co., the Sears homes are enjoying a revival among old-house aficionados. Sears archivists in Hoffman Estates field about 400 calls a year, mostly from curious homeowners.
The Sears homes get more attention for two reasons, says Hunter. One, Sears sold far more than the other companies did. Two, the “Houses” book enables homeowners to identify their houses and join the growing number of self-taught Sears home experts. Sears did not keep records of the homes’ original owners or addresses, so fans have pieced together Sears house histories by talking to surviving original owners and their relatives, networking with fans and digging through attics and basements for letters, blueprints, construction manuals and shipping labels.
Hunter joined the “I brake for Sears houses” cause when she found the “Houses” guide at the library while researching her own house, a 1923 craftsman bungalow (not a Sears home) two years ago. “I checked it out and renewed it and renewed it, while I drove around Elgin looking for homes that matched the pictures in the book,” she recalls. “Now I have two copies–one for the car and one for home.”
After locating and photographing 70 Sears homes in Elgin, Hunter called Sarosh Saher, Elgin’s historic preservation specialist, who referred her to the commission. The commission granted Hunter $1,000 to complete her Sears home survey, says Saher, because it fits into its plan to inventory the city’s older homes.
“We have documented many of Elgin’s older homes by neighborhood, but Rebecca’s is the first survey that’s thematic,” Saher says. “It is important to catalog them not only because they are unique because they are catalog houses, but they are an important part of Elgin’s history.”
Hunter’s study will include photographs plus each house’s address, Sears model name, year built and original owner’s name and occupation. The commission will make copies available to the public at the Elgin Area Historical Society, Elgin’s Gail Borden Public Library and the city’s historic preservation office.
Hunter says she was not surprised to learn that many of the Sears houses were built in clusters, probably because neighbors admired others’ homes.
“The house at 337 Hamilton St. was built by Mr. Garman, who ran Elgin’s Sears sales office, so it’s no coincidence that there are lots of Sears houses on Hamilton,” she says.
Already, Hunter has earned the praise of other Sears devotees for her work. “I commend Rebecca for doing such a fantastic job, not only cataloging the houses but increasing awareness of Elgin’s treasure trove,” says Jeanette Fields of River Forest, former executive director of the Chicago Architecture Foundation and a student of Sears houses.
Saher says when his office gets calls about Sears houses, he refers them to Hunter.
Sears archivists know of similar efforts in Downers Grove to catalog Sears homes but are unaware of other efforts in the Chicago area.
Hunter plans to complete the survey by year’s end. “But it will never be done because information keeps coming in,” she says. Since she mailed questionnaires to the owners of 225 Elgin homes she thought might be Sears homes, calls and letters have poured into Hunter’s home office.
“People call with questions and stories,” Hunter says. “They offer tours of their houses, give me copies of blueprints. But sometimes the owners don’t care if the house is a Sears house and I don’t get the information until the house sells. One man on Bluff City Boulevard saw his neighbor throw out his Sears blueprints, so he took them out of the garbage and gave them to the new owner when the Sears house sold. The new owner was grateful.”
When Hunter meets an owner of a house thought to be a Sears model, she works with the owner to verify the home’s origins. “The first thing we do is try to match the external with a picture in the `Houses’ book,” she says. She then checks mortgage records because Sears was often the original mortgage holder.
She also asks the owners to look for blueprints. “One man found fragments of blueprints in the attic; squirrels had used them to make nests,” she says. “But there was enough to tell they were Sears blueprints.”
Inside the house, she looks for numbered joists or rafters because every piece of wood in Sears homes was numbered.
“My favorite place is under the stairway, which is rarely painted,” she says. “Sometimes people have pulled off baseboards during remodeling and have the Sears labels from the back of the baseboards. Also, we look for engraved letters, usually `SR,’ on bathroom fixtures, hardware and radiators.”
Studying the Sears homes is no passing fancy for Hunter, a Renaissance woman who speaks five languages and reads 11, plays percussion in the Fox Valley Concert Band and has five college degrees. Her career history has ranged from a stint as a media producer to her current posts as a chiropractor and owner of a company that manufacturers safety products for motorcyclists. But she bills herself as a researcher.
At 52, Hunter considers herself typical of the many Baby Boomers who moved away from their hometowns (Hunter is a native of Champaign) but now long for a link to a past that includes porch swings, lemonade stands and 4th of July parades.
“Change is wonderful, but we need that reminder of our childhoods,” she says. “I learned that living in Amsterdam, where they restore the old buildings and trace their family histories. Fortunately, Americans now have a greater appreciation; look at all the preservation groups and old-house magazines.”
Sears archivist Sherie Mascola agrees. “It’s a scary, complicated world we live in,” she says. “As we go into a new century, people are feeling a little unsure of the future. This is a way to connect to a more innocent time. (The Sears houses) are not architecturally significant, but they are pieces of Americana.”
Hunter says the Sears home designs were not unique and reflected what homeowners wanted in those days: Colonial, craftsman, cottage, and the little black dress of early 20th Century architecture, the bungalow.
Sears was a follower, not a leader, in design. “Many are almost identical to plans in other companies’ catalogs. Who copied who? We don’t know,” Hunter says. “They were all trying to sell the most popular designs.”
In fact, the primary purpose of the home sales was to generate sales of building materials, says Mascola. The catalogs featured decorated models and encouraged buyers to furnish their homes with Sears products.
Although the catalogs featured homes such as the bounteous Magnolia for what we now call “move-up buyers,” most of Elgin’s buyers were first-time home buyers who chose utilitarian and modest models such as the Vallonia and the Hampton.
Sears geared its catalog home advertisements to these folks. “Why continue to buy rent receipts when you can pay for a comfortable home of your own with your rent money?” asks the 1926 catalog, which includes a drawing of a family tossing rent receipts into a wastebasket.
By matching addresses with names in old city directories, Hunter has collected the demographics of the buyers of Elgin’s Sears houses. “Forty-five of them were Elgin Watch Factory employees, 29 in the building trades, and most were working class and with young families,” she says. “They bought one-story, starter homes. Only six of Elgin’s are two-story, compared to those in towns like Glen Ellyn and Downers Grove, where there are more of the larger ones.”
An irony, says Hunter, is the sentiment among some Sears homeowners that the homes are inferior. “Some people are insulted when you suggest their home might be a Sears house,” she says. “They consider them prefabricated, although they really weren’t.”
Unlike today’s prefabricated homes that arrive at the home site in whole, factory-made sections, the Sears homes arrived as stacks of cut, mitered and numbered lumber, plus hardware, plaster, lath, flooring, doors, windows, fixtures, cabinetry, down spouts, nails, paint and varnish. Plumbing, heating and electrical equipment were extras, ordered in addition to the basic house packages. Long before the term “sweat equity” was coined, the homeowners assembled them, usually by themselves, using manuals as guides.
“People who know building materials, including local builders, recognize the quality of the houses,” Hunter says. “They tell me they’d much rather have a Sears house, with 2-by-6 ceiling joists and rafters and 2-by-10 headers, than a new house, where a 2-by-6 actually measures 1 1/2 by 5 1/2.’
Most Sears houses were Honor Bilt, the highest quality, or Standard Built. The brand names reflected the quality of materials, not the design. “Many of Elgin’s homes are Honor Bilt,” says Hunter. “So the lumber was `clear’ (no knots larger than a quarter) and the millwork was cypress.”
Hunter is also leading a fundraising campaign to save a Sears house threatened by the wrecking ball. The Americus model on East Chicago Street in Elgin is now owned by the Itasca-based U.S. Shelter Inc., which plans to build townhomes on the site. The developer agreed to give her the home if she could raise $100,000 by the spring of 1999 to move it to another site.
She has begun tracking Sears homes in other towns and hopes to contract with other towns for surveys. Although Elgin has one of the northwest suburbs’ largest concentration of Sears homes, she has spotted them in most of the nearby suburbs too. “Genoa is the only town where I found none, even though it’s on the rail line,” she says.
Hunter’s passion and enthusiasm seem to rub off on the Sears homeowners she meets, many of whom have joined the crusade to preserve these homes that have already enjoyed long lives.
“Rebecca is so gung-ho that now I’m pretty interested (in Sears homes) too,” says Rose Annette Mason.
