Sears Homes in Detroit?

From 1908-1940, Sears, Roebuck, and Co. sold homes through their mail order Modern Homes program. The parts for the homes were pre-fabricated and then shipped to a purchaser, who then assembled the home himself or presumably paid someone else to do so. Sears sold between 75,000 and 100,000 of these homes across the country, depending on the source you consult, and there were about 450 different designs available.

The homes ranged from the fancy Honor Bilt homes to simple bungalows, which did not always have indoor plumbing.

An Honor Bilt Home from 1922

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v1..._Cat_Close.jpg

Picture Credit: http://www.searshomes.org.

But other homes were more modest Bungalows:

Attachment 18875


See the Sears Archive site for more information.

Does anyone know of any of these homes still surviving in Detroit or possibly one of the inner-ring suburbs? I have to think that there is one surviving somewhere!

Arent there some in Royal Oak or thereabouts?

Yes. A very reliable source tells me that 4141 Yorkshire in EEV is a Sears home. It stands to reason, since it doesn't resemble any of the other houses at all [[which are mostly 1920s - 1940s Tudors, brick/stone bugalows, and Colonials). It's the white house.

https://maps.google.com/maps?safe=of...ed=0CDQQ8gEwAA

It, along with the rest of its block, is lovingly maintained. It's just a few blocks from my house.

cman, consider contacting this lady:

http://www.searshomes.org/index.php/about-rose/

she has written books and been on tv a lot with respect to sears homes. i wouldn't doubt that she's cataloged what is where.

Thanks! I came across that site but have not seen any material from her regarding Detroit. It would be worth contacting her, as I am sure it has come up in her research. Given how much Detroit grew during this period, I would be very surprised if there are not several examples of Sears homes in the area.

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Originally Posted by Bham1982

Arent there some in Royal Oak or thereabouts?

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Ferndale has several as well. I live in one of them.

This one is a Sears house. I lived a few doors down.

Not sure if it was Sears or Montgomery Wards but my parents' house in NW Detroit was a catalog house. Could see the #s on the basement rafters for assembling by #. Looked alot like that Winona in pics above. Added onto and porch enclosed later.
There's several similar to it on that block and nearby streets. Grand River 5 Points area circa 1918 when it was still Redford Twp.
So sad. The house is still good, and neighborhood not abandoned like many. 3 months on the market, my mother was fortunate to sell it earlier this year for $11,000. Bought for $19,000 in 1965.....

There are probably thousands of Sears, Aladdin and other kits homes built in the Detroit area.

A Sears Kit house at 849 Notre Dame City of Grosse Pointe, MI.

Ann Arbor has a TON of Sears homes.

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Originally Posted by scottn55

Ann Arbor has a TON of Sears homes.

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They won't admit it though. They say they are Jacobson's homes!

When and why did Sears stop selling them?

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Originally Posted by Lowell

When and why did Sears stop selling them?

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1942 The war effort curb , after the war the suburb was born but sears built the early ones before in NJ? Nobody had time to assemble anymore.

Used to be you received the first shipment , floor joists and flooring then wrote a letter to sears informing them you were ready for the next phase so it was very time consuming. Plus it all came by rail and you had to pick it up at the yard.

Sears also continued to sell houses to corporate customers in the years after 1940. For example, there are 61 Sears houses in Hellertown, PA that were built in the early 1940's for workers at Bethlehem Steel.

Not from sears but you can still buy a kit house that is expandable starting from 300 sqft up to 3000. One room at a time.

There's a small town [[8,000-10,000 pop.) near where I live that has one of the Sears homes on its main street. It's the first one pictured on this thread, the massive Honor built. I have some old catalogs of these homes and when I saw this one, I checked it out and verified it.
It's hard to imagine how it came to be, as a mail order home. It's still in very good shape.

Good God... did any of you read up about Cairo Illinois... the hometown of the Sears Mill that assembled the parts for the Sears home. It makes Detroit look good! :eek:

Gistok, if you're talking about Cairo, I had a cabin in the woods back in the 60's north of there, closer to Carbondale. Actually they do pronounce it Ca ro. Went there once. Scary bad.
Sorry to threadjack.

17125 New York built in 1925 Detroit, MI.

26690 Huntington built in 1941 Hill Historic District Huntington Woods, MI.

I live in one from 1910 in Mount Clemens.

Ditto on the comments about Cairo [Kay'-row to the locals]. The main street could rival Chene Street below the Poletown Plant - http://goo.gl/maps/D7EOf.

Just south of town is a little run-down park with the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers, a great vista to sit on the rocks and ponder the history of America. Logistically speaking Cairo would have been an ideal location for packaging and dispatching the large materials for Sears houses.

though prefabbed, they look better than the homes being built today. Obviously of better quality because they are still standing and in better shape that the ones around them

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Originally Posted by Lowell

When and why did Sears stop selling them?

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Levittowns were the principle downfall of the kit homes. They could build em faster and cheaper using the same principals of Henry Ford. They put up whole subdivisions in an assembly line fashion. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levittown

Lots of the retirement/tax-dodge communities up in the North Carolina mountains sell you the land and a log home kit to assemble [[or have assembled)..

There are quite a few in the older subs in Eastpointe around 9 Mile and Gratiot. My grandmother-in-law lived in one over there. Still had the construction numbers on the timbers in the basement [[insert beam A42 into support B2)

I image the growth of the pre-built housing ala mobile homes and techniques to transport them fully built or in halves to sites also diminished demand for assembly kits. Why get a box of tinker toys and instructions when you can get the whole toy assembled, unless you are into the joy of DIY.

A possible kit house by Aladdin Homes of Bay City, MI.

http://clarke.cmich.edu/resource_tab...ity_index.html

706 University Place City of Grosse Pointe, MI.

I think Highland Park has a few... A friend has one in southwest Detroit.

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Originally Posted by p69rrh51

706 University Place City of Grosse Pointe, MI.

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p69rrh51... that Grosse Pointe home has 1 thing you rarely see... and another thing you almost never see...

Basement windows on the front of a house... and no landscaping fronting a GP home! :eek:

Lustron made these type of homes too. They were all steel construction. Only a handful were found in Metro Detroit. Siding was similar to what is seen at the White Castle! http://www.lustronconnection.org/htm...etroit_MI.html

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Originally Posted by DetroitPlanner

Lustron made these type of homes too. They were all steel construction. Only a handful were found in Metro Detroit. Siding was similar to what is seen at the White Castle! http://www.lustronconnection.org/htm...etroit_MI.html

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Thanks. I used to drive by one of those Lustron homes frequently and always wondered what the interior looked like.

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Originally Posted by Gistok

p69rrh51... that Grosse Pointe home has 1 thing you rarely see... and another thing you almost never see...

Basement windows on the front of a house... and no landscaping fronting a GP home! :eek:

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You should have seen the home a year ago! The house was empty from 09 to the end of last summer the current owners spent most of their time getting the structure back in shape. I have a feeling the landscaping will be this year's project.

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Originally Posted by DetroitPlanner

Lustron made these type of homes too. They were all steel construction. Only a handful were found in Metro Detroit. Siding was similar to what is seen at the White Castle! http://www.lustronconnection.org/htm...etroit_MI.html

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That house is on Ashland backing onto Fox Creek. I've had my eye on it every time I went by there just because it is so unusual, and have been noticing that the upkeep seems to have improved quite a bit in the last year or two. Really great to see the interior photos showing that someone has done something really nice with it. That strip there has so much potential, and, as someone who has a family history there, its been sad to see it fall into such decay and disrepair.

I once ran into a whole multi-colored neighborhood of those enameled Lustron homes in Pennsylvania. It was a very strange sight, to be sure.

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Originally Posted by EastsideAl

That house is on Ashland backing onto Fox Creek....

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Thanks. I found it in Google Maps.

The interior looks as if it would be noisy with all those sound-reflecting surfaces. Maybe they could use some kind of active noise cancellation device to dampen the din.

I want to thank everyone for this very informative thread!! Awsome stuff these modular homes! Very interesting about Sears and other homes. And reading about Cairo IL... wow...

I've been on this forum for 15 years. And I thought I had seen or read about it all... But thanks for proving me wrong! :p

My great uncle lived in one for years...until the 90s, I believe [[and it's still standing and in great shape) in Belleville. I always loved that house. For the life of me, I can't remember the name of the street but it's a 2 lane off of Main Street. I'll remember it about 3 am. It's on lake property but it's near the road.

Tumbleweed Tiny House Company

When we lived near Goodells in the Thumb, the home was a Sears kit home, or so the previous owner told us. It was built around 1912.

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Originally Posted by poobert

Yes. A very reliable source tells me that 4141 Yorkshire in EEV is a Sears home. It stands to reason, since it doesn't resemble any of the other houses at all [[which are mostly 1920s - 1940s Tudors, brick/stone bugalows, and Colonials). It's the white house.

https://maps.google.com/maps?safe=of...ed=0CDQQ8gEwAA

It, along with the rest of its block, is lovingly maintained. It's just a few blocks from my house.

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I am the owner of 4141 Yorkshire and it is indeed a Sears kit house. It was built in 1925 and we are the 3rd owners. Our house has wonderful interior wood work and is one a a few Crescents that's exterior was not modified in some way. If I can find them I will post a picture of the interior door, so you can get an idea of how well built these homes were. Not your everyday prefab house!

http://www.searsarchives.com/homes/i.../1921_3086.jpg

Here's mine.

http://www.antiquehome.org/House-Pla...ng/Senator.htm

This picture looks like numerous blocks on the east side.

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Originally Posted by Hamtragedy

Here's mine.

http://www.antiquehome.org/House-Pla...ng/Senator.htm

This picture looks like numerous blocks on the east side.

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Nice, interesting how you can take a four square and add some different details and make no two the same.

Do any still have the porch railing running all the way to the base like in the picture ?

No. The clapboard wraps around the front porch, with the arched cut-out for drainage. There's 4" clapboard around the bottom of the entire house, which changes to 2" above the band for the upper portion. I'm trying to figure out how to upload some interior images. Mine is the mahogany package, so it probably cost $1200.

Most of the sears homes in Fla that I have seen are different like that with the use of different hardwoods, oak floors and such are rare with most of the floors and trim being in heart pine ,you do not cry as much when you find it painted.

Thx Kimistree for the lead on your lovely home. if you have a Facebook page you can see the home in my Sears Album.

https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?...e=1&uploaded=2

A few corrections to the comments made about kit homes.

1. These homes were not "pre-fabricated" homes. Unlike a modern modular home, these homes were not pre-fabricated in the factory. The owner or builder had to build everything on site.

2. Almost all of the kit homes came with the lumber "pre-cut" or "mill cut". The lumber was cut to the appropriate length to allow it to be assembled based on the blueprints that were provided with each home. This was a big selling point in the days before power tools.

3. The main reason that Sears and Wardway - Montgomery Ward's home division - got out of the kit home business was the collapse of the housing market due to the Great Depression. Both companies had gotten involved in the mortgage financing side of the home business and when homeowners started defaulting on these mortgages, the companies had to write down massive losses on these loans. Shades of the mortgage meltdown of the last several few years! Aladdin, which was based in Bay City, never got into the mortgage business and was able to continue in operation until the 1980s. But even for Aladdin, sales precipitously declined in the 1930s and never returned to the sales levels of the 1920s.

Kit homes by Aladdin, Lewis, Sears, Sterling and Wardway are all over southeast Michigan. Primarily delivered by rail, you will almost always find them within a couple miles of a rail line. There were a lot more railroads back in the 1920s which accounts for kit homes in locations where railroads don't exist today. Detroit had sales offices for Aladdin and Sears and Sears also had a sales office in Ann Arbor. If you want to see a lot of kit homes in a small area, go to Clawson. The museum has a list of over 20 kit homes in the city.

http://www.clawsonhistoricalsociety....kit_homes.html

These are very nice houses, with some individuality and character.

If you want to learn more about Sears houses, the BIBLE is Houses by Mail by Stevenson and Jandl. Your local library should have a copy.

Also, if you want to learn more about Cairo, there is a great documentary that came out recently: http://www.betweentworivers.net/about.htm

Some of the houses linked/posted here are not Sears houses. The Aladdin in Grosse Pointe that p69 posted is a possibility. Need to see more of the other side.

Oldguy--the Magnolia is a rare Sears house. Georgian Revival houses are very common and most people misidentify that style of house as Magnolias. If you found one in Michigan, that would be a big deal to researchers!

Astonishingly, no one has indexed the locations of the Sears houses in the US. I started an index here:
https://plus.google.com/communities/...76485960169168

I run a website that ostensibly is about Sears houses in Chicago area, but I write about catalog houses all over the country. Anywhere there is an interesting story to tell!
sears-homes.com

Hope this information helps someone.

Lara

Sears home for sale in Jefferson Chalmers. Interior demo already started. This one is odd in that it has a 60 foot wide lot; a three car garage and a circular drive that wraps around the back of the house. Plus two neighbors that are the same model; you can see one of those to the left.

https://www.realtor.com/realestatean...-69382?view=qv

Attachment 38075

I would be wary of the stucco aspect,if they just went over the top of the clap board siding with no vapor barrier it would be rotting on the interior.

Quickest way to kill a wood house is by not allowing it to breathe.

More info on kit houses from a local enthusiast http://kithousehunters.blogspot.com