Sears used to sell homes by mail. Cincinnati has the most still standing.
Long before Amazon and internet shopping, you could buy almost anything from a mail-order catalog. Clothing, furniture, jewelry, toys, plant seeds. Even homes.
From 1908 to 1940, customers could pick out their own ready-to-assemble home kit from a Sears, Roebuck and Co. catalog and have the materials shipped directly to them, primarily by rail.
The lumber was pre-cut and numbered so customers could follow an instruction booklet to build the homes themselves – or, more likely, hire a contractor.
Nearly everything came in the packet: lumber, millwork (doors and trim), roofing, paint and varnish, plus plumbing, heating and lighting fixtures – even down to the nails.
The do-it-yourself homes were high quality, yet affordable. The pre-cut wood saved on carpentry costs in a time before power tools. And owners got to participate in the design selection.
Picking your home out of a catalog
You have probably seen numerous Sears homes without recognizing them.
Sears claimed that 70,000 to 100,000 families purchased kit homes from the company, mostly in the Northeast and Midwest where there was easy railroad access.
Because Sears homes were constructed long ago, most people who live in them now don’t even know it.
The origins of the Sears houses were largely forgotten until the 1970s when homeowners began rehabbing early 20th century homes and discovered a large number of them had been bought from a department store’s mail-order catalog.
“In its three decades of operation, Sears set an impressive record, making substantial contributions to 20th-century housing in America,” Katherine Cole Stevenson and H. Ward Jandl wrote in their book, “Houses by Mail: A Guide to Houses from Sears, Roebuck and Company,” which featured more than 350 designs offered in the catalogs.
“Ordered by mail and sent by rail wherever a boxcar or two could pull up, these popular houses were meant to fill a need for sturdy, inexpensive and, especially, modern homes – complete with such desirable conveniences as indoor plumbing and electricity,” Stevenson and Jandl wrote.
Sears started selling self-building materials through catalog by about 1895, but the department wasn’t profitable. So, in 1906, Sears manager Frank W. Kushel was assigned to close it down. Instead, he had the idea to sell entire houses by mail.
In 1908, Sears published “Book of Modern Homes and Building Plans,” the first catalog devoted to mail-order homes.
The high-quality Honor Bilt Modern Homes ranged in price from $650 to $2,500 (about $22,000 to $85,000 today). Home financing was offered starting in 1911.
The catalog was so successful Sears bought its own lumber mill in Mansfield, Louisiana, a lumber yard in Cairo, Illinois, and a millwork plant in Norwood, Ohio.
The Norwood Sash and Door Manufacturing Co. of Ohio was a division of Sears from 1912 to 1945. Cincinnati customers were invited to visit the factory to see the stock and place orders directly. Materials could also be delivered promptly because they were coming locally.
The Norwood plant may be the reason why, by 1925, half of Sears’ 10 home sales offices were in Ohio cities: Cincinnati (located at 129 and 131 W. Fourth St.), Cleveland, Columbus, Akron and Dayton. The others were in New York, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia.
The Great Depression was rough on Sears’ home sales. As the company had financed many of its homes, when customers couldn’t make payments, Sears lost out. The Modern Homes catalog ceased in 1934, but returned the following year, offering fabricated houses only (not the lots or financing) and lasted until 1940.
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Cincinnati has the most Sears homes anywhere
The publication of “Houses by Mail” by the National Trust for Historic Preservation in 1986 launched efforts to locate Sears homes across the country.
Cincinnati has an unusually large amount of Sears homes. Beatrice Lask used the book to identify more than 500 examples in the area for her master’s thesis at the University of Cincinnati in 1990.
Cindy Catanzaro continues that work on her blog, Sears Homes in Ohio, tracking kit homes that have been identified in the state.
“The Cincinnati area has the most Sears Homes located to date of anywhere in the United States. Nowhere else even comes close,” Catanzaro wrote in a 2021 entry.
Catanzaro noted that a Sears ad that appeared in The Enquirer in 1930 boasted “over 3,000” completed homes in Cincinnati, but that may be across the region and Northern Kentucky.
Among the more than 500 Sears homes identified in Cincinnati so far are 11 on Innes Avenue in Northside, 11 in Wooster Place in Westwood and 10 on Eastwood Circle in Madisonville. The Miller House Museum at 7226 Miami Ave. in Madeira, operated by the Madeira Historical Society, is a restored example of the Crescent design from the 1922 Sears catalog and is open to the public.
Then there is the Aurora house at 6416 Grand Vista Ave. in Pleasant Ridge, Cincinnati. The Prairie-style home, reminiscent of the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, was designed by architect John Van Bergen, who studied under Wright. It was built in 1925 for J.J. McHugh, the head of the Norwood Sash and Door Co.
It is thought to be the only one of the Aurora design ever built.
House hunters are still adding more identified Sears kit homes to the National Database of Sears Houses in the U.S.