3/1/2024 0 Comments 99 percent invisible bookLocated in Cairo Illinois, the largest of these mills covered nearly 40 acres, and the sheer variety of homes it shipped out was staggering. Sears prefabricated almost all of these homes in giant mills situated across the country. The resulting Sears Modern Home Program was a hit, particularly after the end of World War I, the influx of returning veterans triggered a need for more housing. Why should newlyweds move into old homes filled with old things when they could move into new homes and fill them with new things from Sears‽ Sears looked at this idyllic scene of families living in harmony and saw … a wasted opportunity. The reigning paradigm of the middle class was the Victorian home with all of these different little rooms for different family members. Most American families at the time were still living in multi-generational housing. And it’s around this time that Richard Sears saw a way to sell even more. For example, according to lore, he intentionally made the Sears Roebuck catalog a little shorter and narrower than the Montgomery Ward one on the theory that it would naturally get stacked on top.īy 1907, Sears and Roebuck were selling the then equivalent of $1.3 billion of merchandise to American families every year. Sears was not the first company to offer kit homes or a mail-order catalog, but it came to dominate the mail-order market in part because its founder, Richard Sears, was that kind of expert that so many people would claim to be over the course of the 20th century but very few actually were: he was a marketing genius. But it’s also a chapter of housing history that was almost lost. Long before the advent of housing developments and the modern suburb, it was the Sears kit home that gave Americans their first taste of 20th-century domestic life. In so doing, they helped usher out the era of the custom site-built house, replacing it with the promise that homes could be standardized and affordable. Sears would go on to ship out some 75,000 homes across the country. Sears promised that, working without a carpenter and only rudimentary skills, a person could finish their Sears mail-order home in less than 90 days. The lumber came pre-cut, kind of like a giant Ikea set, along with an instruction booklet. This seal was to be broken on arrival by the new owner, who would open up their boxcar to find over 10,000 pieces of framing lumber, 20,000 cedar shakes, and almost everything else needed to build the home - all the doors, even the doorknobs. From 1908 to 1940, the Sears Modern Homes Program offered complete mail-order houses to the would-be homeowner - what would come to be called “kit homes.” Customers could select from dozens of different models in Sears Modern Homes Catalog, order blueprints, send in a check, and a few weeks later everything they needed would arrive in a train car, its door secured with a small red wax seal (just like the seal on the back of a letter).
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