Is Yours a MAIL-ORDER House?

Suspect your house is from Sears or another catalog company? Ready to do some research and forensic sleuthing?

- Patricia Poore

Did someone tell you that yours "is a Sears house"? Did they mean literally a house purchased as a kit from Sears, Roebuck-or were they using the term generically to mean a catalog, kit, or mail-order house? Is it even true? Houses ordered by mail were big business in the first quarter of the 20th century, when companies like Sears, Aladdin, Gordon-Van Tine, Sterling, and Montgomery Ward sold kit homes by the railcar-load.

(These houses are often clustered in areas that had good rail freight service during those decades.) Between 1908 and 1940, Sears alone sold up to 100,000 house kits to homeowners across the country, with 370 designs including bungalows, Foursquares and Prairie-style homes; Georgian Revivals, Dutch Colonials, and Cape Cods; Tudor Revivals and Mediterranean styles.

The kit houses, in general, were inexpensive and easily customized.