I thought I’d discussed the Sears kit homes about a decade back, but perhaps it wasn’t for the blog. Anyway, there’s a nice summary by Katrina Gulliver of how Sears and other companies made home-building great a century ago:
A hundred years ago, kit homes were more common in the US. Sold by Sears, Montgomery Ward, and other local firms, buyers received the plans and the pieces for a house and put it together themselves. Economies of scale made these a viable option for someone looking to build a house in the expanding suburbs.
The 1914 Sears Modern Homes catalog shows three homes that could each be bought for $656 (in the small print, they admit your outlay would be more like $1,250 all-in, including brick, cement, plaster — which they don’t supply — and labor). Your kit house would be delivered by rail; it was generally assumed householders would be handy enough (or know whom to hire) to put it all together from the supplied plans.
According to a 1930 report by the National Bureau of Economic Research, National Income and Its Purchasing Power, in 1914, the average clerk could be making $1,000, and a factory manager earning $2,300. That means these houses were within reach of lots of people — especially bearing in mind that land costs in many cities were also relatively low. In Chicago, lots within 5 miles of downtown were available for less than 50¢/square foot in 1914.
Those kit homes included wood, metal, and glass, and reflected both the tastes of consumers and the economies of bulk production. The various styles in the catalog over the years included craftsman, Dutch colonial, Federal, and cottage — styles that have continued to be popular in residential architecture of the US.
The Sears catalog of 1936 states: “This is the age of modern efficiency. No longer can human hands compete with machine precision and production. ‘Speed with accuracy’ is the watchword in any department of our great factories.”
(For those curious about such houses, fans of Sears kit homes put together lists of examples still standing.)
