In 1991, two decades after Susan Stamberg moved into her Washington, D.C., home — with its sun porch, stone fireplace and welcoming vestibule bench — a neighborhood architecture buff informed her she owned a catalog house from Sears, Roebuck and Co. in Chicago.
She was less than thrilled.
“Sears? In New York, you went to Bergdorf’s, B. Altman, Saks. You didn’t go to Sears. What a comedown,” recalls Stamberg, by birth a Manhattanite and by trade a National Public Radio special correspondent.
Today, however, Stamberg is unabashedly house-proud.
“My initial reaction was snobby,” she concedes. Now she brags to architects about her two-story “Maywood,” which Sears sold by mail in the 1920s and sent by train.
The price — $2,635 to $2,914, depending on options and production costs — did not include the cost of land or construction. But it did include virtually everything else, from supporting beams and joists to finishing nails and light fixtures.
“It is designed like a ship,” Stamberg says of the three-bedroom home she and her husband, Louis, now retired from the State Department, bought in 1970 for $36,000. “There is no wasted space.”
To be sure, the house had its flaws, with just one bathroom and too little storage for the couple and their young son. But over 32 years, the only changes they made were enclosing the porch and adding a deck and closet.
“I like all its quirky little pieces. Although it aggravates me not to have closets, I really respect the way it’s designed. Nothing goes un-thought-about,” Stamberg says.
“When I lie in bed and look out the window, I feel like I’m in a treehouse. And the light that comes in is heaven. If it had closets, it would be the perfect house.”
Stamberg’s current pride of place reflects the growing cachet of ready-to-assemble houses, both by those who consciously seek them out and those who learn later what they’ve got.
An estimated 500,000 mail-order dwellings from a dozen or more firms were sold during the previous century, with the “golden age” from 1910 to 1940, says Robert Schweitzer, co-author in 1990 with Michael Davis of “America’s Favorite Homes, Mail-Order Catalogues as a Guide to Popular Early 20th-Century Houses.”
Small wonder. The notion of buying a kit house was a boon to fast-growing communities and remote areas across the country.
A potential homeowner could see what he or she wanted in a magazine ad, sales office or catalog, write a check and order the American dream. It would arrive at the nearest train depot in one or two boxcars, weighing upwards of 50,000 pounds, to be hauled by horse cart or truck to the building site.
Armed with detailed instructions, the buyer (or a hired contractor) assembled as many as 30,000 numbered pieces. And when it was done, yet another happy family would be home.
Panelized chicken coops
The first kit houses were said to have been developed by Ernest Hodgson of Dover, Mass., who started selling panelized chicken coops in 1892, notes Schweitzer.
Ten years later, he had expanded to automobile garages and vacation cottages and added year-round houses a few years after that.
From 1907 — when the Aladdin Co. of Bay City, Mich., first touted a “knocked down” two-room cottage for $126 in a tiny Saturday Evening Post ad — until 1982 — when this longest-surviving of the “Big Six” manufacturers stopped production — kit and catalog homes were a vital part of the nation’s march toward affordable mass housing.
Many of the major manufacturers were in the Midwest: Sears and Montgomery Ward were based in Chicago; Aladdin Homes, Sterling Homes and Lewis Manufacturing Co. (later Lewis/Liberty) all sprouted in Bay City; and Gordon-Van Tine was in Davenport, Iowa.
Sears, already a trusted name in mail-order, entered this fledgling industry in 1908, selling house plans to boost demand for its building materials before adding catalog kits in three price grades.
Sears came to dominate this field, too, though there is disagreement over numbers.
Some experts contend Sears sold 100,000 ready-to-assemble homes between 1917 and 1939, when it published its last kit-house catalog.
Schweitzer maintains that Sears sold only about 50,000 kit homes; the other 50,000 or so were conventional homes Sears built in the 1920s and ’30s with its own materials, sometimes in its own developments.
Whatever the figures, the term Sears house, “like Xerox copiers and Kleenex tissues, became synonymous with catalog and kit homes,” said Mary Rowse, a longtime chronicler of the architectural history of Washington neighborhoods.
It was Rowse who told the Stambergs about their Maywood while researching a 1991 exhibit on 100 catalog homes in Chevy Chase, Md., where she lives. And she still approaches people all over town who may not realize they live in prefabricated houses.
Two generations
In suburban Cheverly, Md., a Sears “Alhambra” bought in 1927 by Raymond Bellamy came with beautiful oak-and-leaded-glass bookcases on either side of the brick fireplace. The kitchen included a flip-down ironing board and a Hoosier cabinet complete with flour sifter. His son Raymond Bellamy Jr. still lives there.
The house was built on an acre and a half by developer Robert Marshall and priced at $18,000. When it didn’t sell, Bellamy Sr. traded 11 of his own undeveloped lots there for the house and grounds.
“Our house was customized,” says Raymond Jr., who moved back into his childhood home in 1967 with his wife, Betty, to help out his widowed mother.
“The original plans called for a sunroom where the covered porch was. That’s the north side of the house, which didn’t get much light, so they made the living room into one big room to include the intended sun porch.”
The original French doors to the dining room were replaced by a wide arch with oak columns topping more leaded-glass curio cabinets, says Bellamy, who raised his own children there.
There have been some changes over three generations. The senior Bellamys covered the deteriorating stucco with white asbestos shingles. In the process, workmen removed the Spanish-style parapet over the porch, replacing it with a peaked roof. Awnings of canvas gave way to aluminum.
Raymond Jr. hoped to have the house listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
“We’ve been told not to hold our breath. The purists down at the Department of Interior felt (the asbestos shingles) disturbed the pristine nature of the house.”
The kits’ popularity mirrored the country’s development.
“It’s amazing when you start looking at the types of cultural and social conditions kit and catalog houses fulfilled in the period between, let’s say, 1910 to World War II,” says Schweitzer, who teaches architectural history at Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti.
As the population jumped at the turn of the last century, so did demand for housing. Electric streetcars and automobiles carried workers to homes farther from their jobs downtown.
The role of RFD
The Rural Free Delivery Act of 1896 brought mail — including catalogs and merchandise — to the hinterlands, he says.
Kits included beams, flooring, walls, nails, hinges, paint, shingles, doorknobs, downspouts, plumbing pipes, electrical wiring and light fixtures.
Some companies threw in free shipping. Sears included a pair of trees ready for planting. Sears, Ward’s and a few other companies even provided mortgages, so the disenfranchised could achieve their goal of homeownership.
“In the days before strict bank regulations, if you were not a WASP you had trouble getting a loan. If you were a woman or if you were black, forget it,” says Schweitzer.
“If you had a last name that ended in an s-k-i, it was tough. A number of these companies, especially Sears and Montgomery Ward, didn’t care who you were.”
This policy had a price. The Great Depression forced the home kit makers to foreclose on thousands of homes they had financed, and ultimately drove Sears out of the catalog house business.
“Wherever there was a railway, a Sears house community would develop because it was so easy to get,” said historian Kathryn Holt Springston, who conducts an annual bus tour and slide lecture of nearly 100 mail-order homes in Arlington, Va., for the Smithsonian Associates program.
Occasionally, she says, a builder would order one house to use as a template and produce additional “pseudo Sears” houses.
Kit styles ranged from simple to sumptuous. Virtually every kit-house company touted Colonial, Tudor, Cape Cod, even Spanish Mission models. Most firms had staff architects — Sears was the first to hire women — who borrowed freely from each other’s plans.
Some developers ordered multiple homes to create what amounted to small subdivisions, sometimes without crediting the manufacturers at all. So did corporations, eager to house workers, blue-collar and executive-level alike.
In 1917, Sears offered the “Sumner,” a four-room (but no bath) bungalow with front porch for $237. The next year, the company introduced the “Magnolia,” possibly its all-time grandest model, which ranged from $5,140 to $5,972, depending on production costs. By 1921, the Magnolia’s price had risen to $7,960 for four bedrooms, 21/2 baths, three upstairs decks and six soaring porch columns, intended, no doubt, to evoke the Old South.
Similarly, the 1926 Lewis “Dorchester,” a sweeping 66 feet wide, was described in ads as “a mansion rare in grace and permanent beauty.”
The Marlboro
The 1925 Lewis “Marlboro,” a clip-gabled Modern Dutch Revival, measured 42 by 30 feet, with an expansive design perfect for “the wide suburban lots of the automobile.”
Three years ago, builder Malcolm Friar and his wife, Dale, jumped at the chance to buy a Marlboro in Chevy Chase, Md., for $550,000.
“The owner told us it was a kit house, and I found that amazing,” she said. “It’s so large. What sold me on it immediately was the size of the entrance hallway. It wasn’t one of those tiny, dark entrances that you see in so many Chevy Chase Colonials.”
The couple loved the wide sun porch and formal dining room. A previous owner had removed the pantry to expand the kitchen, but left what the Friars believe is an original built-in china cupboard.
As more people discover they are living in historic homes, says Rowse, they may renovate.
Indeed, when Carter and Margaret Griffin bought their own Maywood last year not far from the Stambergs, one of the first things she did was commission a 14-foot window box just like the one shown in 1920s catalogs.
“You know, they paid $495,000 for their house,” confides a delighted Susan Stamberg.
So much for Sears being down market.
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For more information on Sears mail-order homes visit http://www.searsmodernhomes.com.
