[gentle music] - Jenny Pederson: Welcome, everyone, to today's History Sandwiched In.

So, we are excited to have you all join us this afternoon.

For those of you that are joining us for the first time, welcome to History Sandwiched In.

This is a regularly occurring lecture series that runs from March through November, and we highlight a range of topics relevant to the people, places, and spaces of Wisconsin, as well as the larger Midwest.

As we get started, I am very excited to introduce Jim Draeger.

He is presenting "Postal Perfect Architecture: Sears and Roebuck Houses."

A note that any opinions expressed today are those of our speaker and not those of the Wisconsin Historical Society or the society's employees.

As we get to our speaker, a brief introduction.

Jim Draeger, co-author of Bottoms Up: A Toast To Wisconsin's Historic Bars And Breweries and Fill 'er Up: The Glory Days of Wisconsin Gas Stations, worked in the field of historic preservation and architecture at the Wisconsin Historical Society for more than 32 years, most recently as the State Historic Preservation Officer.

From roadside architecture to Northwoods resorts, Jim celebrates the importance of ordinary buildings through his research, writing, and lectures.

Please join me in giving a very warm welcome to an amazing presenter, Jim Draeger.

[audience applauds] - Jim Draeger: So, we're just gonna jump right in here.

About 40 years ago, I worked in-- out of Nashville, Tennessee, for a consultant doing architectural and historical surveys.

We'd go to a community, and we'd photograph every building over 50 years old, research the history of them, and basically write the architectural history of that community.

And one day, I was in Gaffney, South Carolina, and I was walking along the street, and I see this building on the top left side, and the owner came out of the house and told me it was a Sears and Roebuck house.

And at that time, there wasn't much information available publicly about those, and I had never heard of 'em before.

But I made a little note on my clipboard that said Sears and Roebuck, and then continued on doing the work, and a little while later, the owner of the house on the bottom right came out and said their house was a Sears and Roebuck house too.

So, years later, I was able to confirm that the one at the top was actually a Sears and Roebuck house called the Alhambra.

And you'll see some other examples of that today.

And the one on the bottom, I could not find until last year.

So, it took me 42 years to be able to identify this one on the bottom.

And it comes from a catalog that was produced in Oklahoma by a company called Aurelius-Swanson Company.

So, just because somebody says a building is a Sears house doesn't mean it's a Sears house.

I've come to see that as, like, when somebody hands you a tissue and they say, "Do you need a Kleenex?"

It's like that.

It's just become a generic term for these in our popular culture.

So, where do these houses come from?

Well, there's a long history of house designs coming out of books that predates Sears by a significant amount of time.

The first books that described architecture for builders were called builder guides.

And the book on the very top, The Works of Asher Benjamin, is one of these builder's guides, and it was designed to teach carpenters how to do new construction techniques.

So, if you wanted to know what was going on, you know, the way that you learn new techniques was by looking through the-- pawing through these builder's guides and getting ideas.

So, they would have technical information on how to build circular staircases and things like that.

But they'd also have some plates with just designs in them, like a door surround for the entry of a house or a fireplace mantel or something like that.

So, they're kind of inspirational idea books for both architects and for builders.

Out of these grow more complex works, like the work in the middle, The Model Architect by Samuel Sloan.

And in Samuel Sloan's book, he produced a number of plates with designs of houses that were elevations of the houses.

So, he'd actually give you a design and a floor plan.

And as the builder or the architect, you'd have to fill in all of the stuff that he didn't provide for you, like measurements, for example.

But a lot of houses were built from these plan books.

And the building adjacent to that page is a house in Janesville, Wisconsin that was built according to one of Samuel Sloan's designs.

The book we see on the bottom right is a book designed by George Barber.

George Barber was an architect who moved down to Knoxville, Tennessee, after the Civil War.

So, he's a Yankee moving into the South.

He was a carpetbagger.

And as a carpetbagger, he was having a hard time finding jobs.

And he decided that he would just try to see if he could sell blueprints by mail.

So, he started up a company and advertised in magazines, and you could send away to Sloan using-- finding an illustration in one of his catalog books, and he would send you the complete set of blueprints for the house.

And he would also-- He designed these very elaborate Queen Anne houses, and he would also source the millwork for you to a local lumber company that he worked for so you could get the turn posts and the fireplace mantels and things like that to be able to accomplish his designs.

And his houses were built all over the country.

This one happens to be in Eau Claire, Wisconsin.

And he was successful enough that others came after him and also started doing these blueprint books back in the 1880s, 1890s, into the early 20th century.

But the catalog house, as we have come to know it, came from a little company in Bay City, Michigan, that was-- The man who was the principal of the company had seen an advertisement in a magazine for a build your own boat kit.

They would ship you all of the materials, flat packed.

And then, you would build the boat out of the pieces that they sent you.

Everything was cut to length, and it was a kit, basically.

And he thought, "We could do that for houses."

So, in 1904, he starts up a build-it-yourself house company called Aladdin Homes that quickly became the largest manufacturer of mail order houses in the country.

In 1918, Aladdin's sales accounted for 2.37% of all the housing starts in the United States.

So, think about that.

2% of all the housing starts in the United States were Aladdin homes.

Very successful.

At its peak year in 1926, it sold 3,650 houses.

Another company that was instrumental in the startup of these mail order houses was a company called Gordon-Van Tine Company that was based in Davenport, Iowa.

And Gordon-Van Tine was a millwork company, so it sold all the decorative pieces for houses.

Staircases, baseboards, fireplaces, door surrounds, windows and doors, all of that kind of stuff.

And they began selling this stuff through catalogs.

And the success of Gordon-Van Tine as a millwork company was that they would package these components all together with a set of blueprints, kind of like what Samuel Sloan was doing, but all in house.

And this eventually became a mail order house business as well.

And they publicized themselves through periodicals and magazines.

You can see these are-- The illustration on the top is from a magazine ad for Aladdin Homes, selling one of their houses, five-room home for the low, low price of $493.

[audience chuckles] So, many of these early houses were very affordable houses that were targeted at a working-class buyer.

The image on the bottom is from the Gordon-Van Tine company catalog, and one of the things these companies would do to try to sell their houses was to offer testimonials in the catalogs from people who had already bought them.

This one was a testimonial for someone in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, who bought a house and built it at 550 Third Street.

It took a little bit of finding, because it changed-- the house changed numbers, or the street changed numbers and names both.

So, it took a little digging to find it, but this building is still around yet.

And he's bragging about buying his plan number 116 and made very little change to it, though others made more.

Sears and Roebuck followed on the heels of these companies, though they were involved in millwork business much earlier than they were involved in the catalog house business.

Sears was founded in 1886 as a general merchandise mail order business, and as you probably all know, they sold literally anything you could imagine through the Sears and Roebuck catalogs.

They began selling millwork and plans in 1895, and they were not all that successful in that business.

As a matter of fact, they hired a new manager and told him to come in and shut down the millwork business, because they were losing money on it.

But he convinced them to go into the mailer house business instead.

And was very successful to the point that Sears eventually became the largest supplier in the United States of catalog houses.

And we're looking at here an illustration of one of their millwork catalogs.

They continued to publish just millwork catalogs all through the period of time that they produced houses, but they also had house catalogs, too, and the one on the right is a house catalog.

This is one of their earliest catalogs from 1908.

Sadly, no records remain of Sears home sales.

The Sears company threw them all out, like many companies do.

And so, it makes it really difficult to determine where did these houses go, how many were actually built, all of that sort of thing.

And it was also complicated by the fact that Sears ran a home construction division that would build any house for you.

You could go to the Sears Home Construction office and bring in a set of blueprints, and they would spec that out, out of their millwork operation, and they would construct that house, actually construct that house for you.

And they would also work with you if you ordered a house through the catalog.

They'd make sure that house was delivered, and they'd resolve whatever issues you had with the house.

This house has the lovely name of Modern Home 122, and it's located in Cochrane, Wisconsin.

The first home catalog of 1908 offered 22 models, and the early plans for their houses were all referred to by number.

After the mid teens, romantic and picturesque names were given to these as part of the marketing schemes for the houses, so they got fancy names after a while.

Sears also promoted their houses on the basis of cost, quality, quick delivery.

Mail order houses were advertised in the Sears catalog, but they were also advertised in popular publications of the time, like House Beautiful magazine.

One of the things that made Sears very successful in the home business was Sears offered home financing beginning in 1911 at a time where home mortgages were rare.

Most people didn't have mortgages on their houses until after the Great Depression.

And so, if you wanted to build a house, banks didn't really borrow money for people to build houses.

If you wanted to build a house, you usually borrowed money from your neighbors, or maybe the butcher down the street would give you a loan.

There was an informal kind of loan network that arose for people who wanted to build a house.

So, Sears stepped into a brand-new market with these home mortgages, and their payment plans included cash payment as the building was being built and easy payments over time.

The payment plan was 2.5% down and 1% a month.

Mortgages could go as long as 15 years.

And at this time, most people's, if they could get financing for their houses, it was only about five-year mortgage.

So, 15 years was a long mortgage for the time.

You could also include the cost of the lot in your mortgage, which is also very interesting.

So, I think this had a great deal to do with the success of the Sears Company in the boom years of the 1920s.

But it ended up hurting the company badly during the Depression, and we'll talk more about that later.

Sears houses reflected popular tastes of the time with designs that were often simple, austere, and slightly dated.

The interesting thing about looking at these catalogs is there are a lot of houses being offered in styles that aren't really popular anymore.

They're more conservative.

And I think it was a matter of knowing their market and knowing the people who were buying these houses, they're a little afraid of doing something too outlandish.

They want to be a little more conservative in their buying habits.

So, this is a Sears model called the Maytown.

And up on the top, you see two examples, one in Chilton, Wisconsin, and one in Reedsburg.

And they're basically Queen Anne houses being built long after the Queen Anne was no longer popular.

This is about 10 years after, or even 15 years after Queen Anne houses were no longer considered to be modern architecture anymore.

And Sears also did testimonials for their houses as well.

The house on the top is a house in Eau Claire, Wisconsin.

It was built by a man named Mr.

Kroger, and the one on the bottom was built by someone named Jules Mommaert from Green Bay, Wisconsin.

And the challenge that these companies had is to get people to buy a house sight unseen.

How many of you have ever bought a house sight unseen?

Anybody?

[audience chuckles] A couple have, excellent.

Brave people, right?

It didn't work out so well?

[laughs] Yeah, so, you know, they've got to convince people to look at an illustration in a catalog and jump from that to actually buying a house from them.

So, one of the ways to do that was to offer testimonials from satisfied customers who gush about what great houses they are, and how much people should be willing to purchase one of their houses.

This, what we're looking at right here is the instruction manual for building a Montgomery Ward's house.

Montgomery Ward also produced houses, not in the numbers that Sears did, but they produced houses here as well.

And I was lucky enough to be able to buy this erection manual on eBay about a decade or so.

It's the only one that I know exists.

None of the Sears ones have ever been discovered.

And this is the actual instructions that were given to the purchaser of a pre-cut house to explain to them how to put it together.

And it begins with cautionary note after cautionary note, [chuckles] which is repeated again and again in the booklet.

One of the things they tell you is don't cut a board.

Everything's pre-cut.

So, if you cut a board, that board is supposed to go somewhere else, and you're gonna be in trouble if you do that.

So, what they told you instead is stack the lumber in your yard in a very specific order.

And you can see this illustration here is the correct method for piling lumber.

And they show you how to how to stack all this lumber.

So, as you're building your house, you're starting at the front of the pile, and you're moving to the back of the pile.

When you get to the end, your house is done.

[audience laughs] So, all of these pre-cut houses did this, had these instructions to help people, because many of the people who built-- who bought these houses built them themselves.

It was a "do it yourself kit" kind of endeavor.

Many people hired carpenters to build them for them, but many people built their own.

They also offered guarantees to convince people to buy their houses, and all of the companies offered guarantees of various kinds.

Those of us that have been around modern lumber would probably be shocked to know that the Aladdin Home Company offered you a dollar a knot for any knot, every knot that you found in the finished materials of the house.

So, think about that.

We were looking at a $493 house before.

It was very, very good quality materials.

They sourced their materials, all these companies sourced the materials from the finest quality materials that were available, because they had to sell you on these houses sight unseen.

So, Sears houses used southern yellow pine for the 2x4 material, the framing material for the house.

That-- If you're lucky enough to own a Sears house today, if you want to drive a nail into that stud, you have to drill a hole first, because that wood is so dry and so hard that you can't just pound a nail into it.

All of the trim material on the outside of the house was made out of cypress, which is very rot resistant, so they went over and above.

So, what did they guarantee with these guarantees?

Well, in the-- Sears guaranteed, first of all, lumber and millwork are as represented.

So, it's good quality.

If they shipped you a damaged piece of material, you could just write Sears, and they'd send you a replacement for it.

That it meets or exceeded standard lumber grade, so better than average quality lumber.

Immediate shipment, so as soon as you place your order, they ship your house to you.

So, you better be ready before you send that mail, that coupon in.

You could return it for a refund, not after you built it.

[audience laughs] but if you got the material, if you got the material, and you didn't like the quality of the material, they would give you a full refund, and just ship it back to us, and we'll take it back.

And then, they stood behind their materials and would replace anything that was damaged as well.

This is an advertiser.

Well, it's a promotion in one of their catalogs for how easy it is to build a Sears house.

And they'd run these in the catalogs periodically to convince people, yes, you too could build one.

And you can see here that this person built a Sears house.

It was a carpenter who built this, so someone who had some experience, but built the entire house in 583 hours, which is much faster than conventional construction.

Part of that is because of the system of these pre-cut houses, every board was already cut for you.

Everything except the exterior siding was already cut to size, so you could just pick up board labeled A-110 and find a board labeled C-83 and nail the two of 'em together and proceed on through the instruction book until you had your house completed.

So, imagine you're a newlywed like Spencer and Sylvia Nelson, and you wanna build a new house to start your life together, but you happen to live on Washington Island off the tip of Door County.

How do you get a house to Washington Island?

Well, everything's got to be shipped, right?

They got to ship it all over on a barge.

Well, they decided that they would build a Sears house for that very reason.

So, they had a Sears house.

They bought a kit called the Sears Wilmore, and Spencer hired a local carpenter to nail the house together, and they built the house.

And this is the one that they built.

That's actually a picture that they sent to me of their house after it was constructed.

And there's the catalog's design for the Wilmore down on the bottom.

Sears also offered masonry houses as well.

You could build a brick or stone house from Sears.

The way they did that is they just omitted the exterior cladding material, and you bought that locally.

So, you bought your brick or your stone locally.

And they even published a specialty catalog of masonry houses that could be built.

So, this illustration from the catalog here is of a design of theirs called the Stratford.

And up in the top left, that's a house that was built in Baraboo from a Sears kit.

The one on the bottom left is not too far from here.

It's on Emerson Street, just off of Park Street, and that house is reputedly built from stone from the second capitol building.

But I haven't tried to verify that.

And that's a design called the Crescent.

We'll see more of the Crescent as we go on.

Sears offered over 470 different house designs over time, and part of the reason why they were able to offer so many designs is that they reused components from one design to another.

These are two houses.

The one on the left-hand side is from Janesville, called the Woodland, and the one on the right-hand side is the Americus.

And you can see that they both use these very particular porch posts that were a Sears designed, specialty designed porch posts.

So, when they were assembling these kits, when you placed your order, they'd go through the millwork warehouse, and they'd say, "Okay, we need two of these windows.

"We need four of these porch posts.

We need three of these doors."

And they just go through and fill the order from the kit of parts.

And then, if somebody ordered a different house, that packing list would change.

It's kind of like buying from Amazon, and they're packing it all in one box.

Kind of like the same thing.

And so, over two dozen plans featured this particular porch post.

So, they had over two dozen designs that used that one particular element.

Most house designs were only offered for a few years before being replaced by newer designs.

But an exception are some perennially popular designs like the Wesley, which debuted in the Sears catalog in 1912 and lasted until 1940.

So, it was a very popular design.

And here are some Wesleys here.

As we're looking at these, the one on the top left is in Ripon, Wisconsin.

The bottom left is one that's also in Ripon, Wisconsin.

They're actually just a few blocks from each other, and the one on the bottom right-hand side is here in Madison.

It's on Baldwin Street near Tenney Park.

You can actually see it from the park.

But not all their houses were ordinary designs.

This is a Sears house that was built in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, and the catalog name for this was the Osborn.

And when my son was born-- this is a true story-- When my son was born, my wife's like, "What should we call him?"

And I said, "How about if we call him Osborn?"

Which is the true story of how he came to be called Nick.

[audience laughs] [chuckles] And... I'm gonna read you something from the catalog text, the ad copy for the Osborn, 'cause they promoted these things by describing them in marketing language.

"Bungalow authorities agree "that this type of architecture has come to stay.

"They claim that as years go by, "the bungalow will be even more in demand "than at the present time.

"And should one wish to sell, he will have little difficulty in finding a buyer."

Resale value.

"While the Osborn is neither extreme nor extravagant, "it has all the earmarks of a cozy, well-planned, and artistic house."

And this was quite a popular model for Sears.

As somewhat odd as this house looks, it has a very Japanese look to the design.

The way the roof kicks up at the peak, at the tip of it, and the way the porch posts are cross stacked are elements taken out of Japanese architecture.

And you can see these houses all over Wisconsin.

I've documented 15 of these so far in Wisconsin, and I'm sure there are probably more hiding out there as well.

And Sears houses came in all sizes for all different clientele.

This is one of the smallest ones that I ever discovered.

I was actually stunned when I came down the street to see that a house as small as this has not been modernized.

They, you know, they changed the siding in the '40s, but other than that, the house is completely intact.

The design of this one was called the Fairy.

So, they produced these very modest houses, just like Aladdin Homes Company did.

But they also supplied more large, more pretentious houses as well.

The Fairy was a $993 house, so it was a dollar cheaper than that Aladdin house we were looking at.

So, if you wanna save some money, you might just wanna go with that Sears house.

This one was called the Glen Falls.

This particular house is in Lake Geneva.

You can see it's a masonry example as well.

So, this person bought their brick from a local brickyard and built a rather substantial-looking house that mixes some Tudor and Colonial elements.

The most popular houses that Sears sold were bungalows.

The bungalow was so celebrated in the 19-teens and '20s that people wrote songs about bungalows, believe it or not.

And it was part of the popular culture.

The bungalow just became part of the popular culture.

But part of the reason for the popularity of the bungalow is it was a very efficient floor plan.

It had very little wasted space in the house.

And the bungalows, there's a very common floor plan to bungalows that most bungalows have.

And if you've ever lived in a bungalow, I'm probably gonna describe your house floor plan if it was a one-story house.

As you walk in, there's the living room.

Then behind it is the dining room.

Behind that is the kitchen.

Then off to the side is a bedroom, bathroom, bedroom.

That's a standard two-bedroom bungalow plan.

And so, it was perfect for plan books, because they were trying to sell houses that used space as efficiently as possible.

The plan book companies actually had people who were experts that would vet every design that went into their plan books.

Aladdin Homes had something called the Gang of Seven, and the Gang of Seven pored through every new plan and made sure that it was the most efficient that they could make it.

Why?

Because it was-- They made more money.

Their profits were higher if it was more efficient.

But also, they wanted to produce houses that were excellent houses for the money.

Here's another bungalow that Sears produced.

This one was called the Vallonia.

I found quite a few Vallonias in Wisconsin.

This one was built in 1921 in Wauwatosa.

Here's a couple examples of a design called the Hazelton.

Both of these are in Madison.

One's on West Lawn, and the other is at Mandan Crescent.

But they also designed in other styles as well.

These period revival houses were very popular after World War I. Returning servicemen who had been in Europe had seen all of that beautiful European architecture.

And when they came back and started their own families and built their houses, many of them built period revival houses.

And that's why we have such a popularity of period revivals in the United States.

It's because of these servicemen who were coming back.

So, this one was called the Willard, and it was loosely based on English cottages.

This is a brick version of a Tudor house called the Belmont.

This one happens to be in Madison, too, at Park Place, just off of Regent Street.

And this is the colonial house called the Crescent, and this is the most popular design, I believe, in the Sears catalog.

I've found 20 of these so far in Wisconsin.

I was just in Key West for a couple of months, hence my fading tan, and I believe I saw a Crescent in Key West.

I took photos of it, but I haven't gone to the catalogs yet to verify its design.

And as we get on a little farther, you'll understand that it may not be the easiest thing to document, but these are examples.

The one on the top left is on Regent Street here in Madison.

The one on the top right is from Janesville, Sheboygan in the middle, and at the bottom, East Bristol, so just up highway 151.

This is a house in Wauwatosa.

It's the only one of this particular design that I've found in Wisconsin.

It's got this very unusual roof line with elements that are borrowed from French provincial architecture and very, very uncommonly seen on American architecture.

And they mix this French provincial design with a more familiar kind of colonial design, with that side gabled roof and the kind of flat front on it.

This is the Alhambra.

This is a Mission style one.

I showed you a picture of this in the very beginning.

Not all that popular in Wisconsin.

And I think it's partly because people didn't really build stucco houses in Wisconsin because of the climate.

This is courtesy of the Aladdin Homes Company.

This is a picture that they published in a catalog in 1950 that showed how you loaded the railroad boxcar full of materials, because that's how your house came.

It came by boxcar.

A typical Sears house was two boxcars full of material.

So, you'd order your house from Sears.

You'd get a note back from Sears telling you when you could expect the shipment.

The freight agent would call you from the railroad depot and say, "Your cars are here.

Please unload them as soon as you can."

[audience laughs] And you'd go with a horse team and a wagon to the railroad station, and you would unload your two boxcars full of material.

The average Sears House kit had 25 tons of materials with more than 30,000 parts.

So, you know, think of it in terms of a Lego set.

It's like the biggest Lego set ever.

They provided-- You could order plumbing, electrical fixtures, heating systems as options to add on to your order.

You could even order the paint to paint your house when you're finished.

And for many people who built these houses, this was the family's first steps to modern home living with modern HVAC systems, central air, indoor plumbing, indoor bathrooms.

So, this was sort of a state-of-the-art house that could be delivered to the most rural places in the United States.

Sears started offering financing plans beginning in 1912, and their sales peaked just before the Depression in 1929.

And while Sears financing helped many homeowners to purchase their homes, many of those people ended up defaulting during the Great Depression, and Sears was left with a huge problem.

They were forced to liquidate $11 million in defaulted debt in the company, and Sears-- It actually threatened the viability of the whole Sears company, because the losses were so great.

And it was also a public relations disaster, because Sears had to foreclose on their own customers.

Those were people who would otherwise be ordering things through the Sears catalog, and they lost those people as customers forever when they defaulted on their loans and Sears foreclosed on their houses.

So, as a result of that, Sears stopped offering mortgages by 1933.

And if we know our history, the FHA, the Federal Housing Administration, was founded in 1933, and they started underwriting home mortgages.

The federal government started underwriting mortgages so that people would build, and we could build our way out of the Depression, as they referred to it.

And as a result of that, Sears just was out of the market for those.

And Sears continued selling houses, and it issued the Modern Homes catalog until 1942.

And despite the fact that their sales recovered after the end of the Great Depression, by 1942, Sears just got out of the business completely.

And there are a lot of reasons for why they got out of it.

Competition from other companies doing similar kinds of work, but also the beginning of tract housing, companies like Levittown just building entire communities, one building after another, after another, after another.

Even in Madison, there were companies that were, after World War II, that were building houses, like in Soelch's Subdivision, there was a company there who built the houses, and they would start, they'd dig a hole, and then they would, when the hole was finished, they'd send the foundation people in, and the people digging the hole would dig the hole next door.

And then, once the foundation people had finished their foundation, the framers would come and start framing.

And they had specialties in the construction trade that would just march from house to house down the block, and they'd build them one after another.

And that kind of economy of construction made houses more affordable.

But it also meant that what Sears was doing was not so unique anymore.

So, in 1995, a guide was published to Sears and Roebuck houses.

This was the first attempt to really try to document the history of the company, and the authors went to the Sears archives, and they reproduced every house illustration that Sears still had.

Sears was actually missing a couple of catalogs, and so they didn't have the complete picture, but they had the vast majority of the Sears designs.

And then they organized them all in a way that you could use out in the field.

You could-- They organized them by the overall shape of the house.

So, if it was a side-gabled house where the gable, the ridge of the roof parallels the street, you could look in that section at the one-story examples or the two-story examples, and you could find these houses.

And that's how I found the Alhambra that I showed you in the first image.

I looked it up.

I bought the book.

I looked it up.

I said, "Oh, it's called the Alhambra."

The other one, not so much.

Forty-two years later, I finally found it.

So, it made it possible for people to be able to find these houses.

And it became a kind of "do it yourself" hobby for people to-- like me to go around and look for these.

One of the beauties of my job working for the Wisconsin Historical Society is I traveled the state of Wisconsin extensively.

I drove about 30,000 miles a year within the borders of Wisconsin.

So, there's no town I haven't been to.

Many of these places I had to go to meet with someone, and I'd go about a half an hour, an hour early just to make sure I got there in time for the meeting in case something happened.

And I'd have a little spare time on my hands.

So, I'd drive up and down the street and look for Sears houses.

[audience laughs] And so, this one here I found actually, I had a conference in Lake Geneva, and I was driving down the street and found a whole neighborhood of Sears and Roebuck houses in Lake Geneva, including this house called the Ardara.

And one of the things that makes these houses stick out is Sears sold these houses based on that picture.

So, that's all you got was a floor plan and that picture, and you made the decision to buy a house.

So, they load up the front of the house with all sorts of details, even if it's a-- This is a very modest house, and it's got this very substantial and very eye-catching front porch, because they're illustrating in the catalog, and they need something to draw your eye.

So, when I'm driving down the street, and I'm looking for these houses, one of the things I look for are just houses that stand out in the neighborhood.

They look different.

They look more architecture than a similar house of the same size.

This is one I found in Pepin, Wisconsin, and you can see it has this elaborate stick work on the front gable of it.

Also has those very distinctive porch posts that we've seen before.

And the gable brace, the thing right up at the peak of the roof, that little wooden trim piece, is something that a lot of these catalog houses included in their designs too.

So, when I see a gable brace too, I stop and take a look at it and see if it might be one of these houses.

So, there's a kit of parts that you can get used to if you look at these things enough.

We've seen these porch posts.

These brackets under the roof are a very typical Sears bracket.

That's called a knee brace bracket.

But what makes it unusual for Sears is you have that diagonal brace that comes down, and then there's this piece that comes down and intersects it in between the two diagonal braces.

That's a Sears house trait.

I've actually seen 'em in a couple houses that are not Sears houses.

They may have been built by the homes division possibly, or somebody else may have just copied it.

But it's a good-- When I see one of those, the brakes go on, and I pull over and take a good, serious look.

[audience chuckles] So, you can see all three of these designs use that single knee brace bracket.

And the one on the top right also uses that gable brace that we've seen before.

This is one we saw the detail of.

This one happens to be in Tomahawk, Wisconsin.

And the person who owns this house found the shipping label from Sears tacked onto a piece of lumber.

So, when they bundled it all up, they put that note on there so they know where knew where the package was going.

And they never took it off the board when they put the board on the house.

Why would you, right?

It's just gonna get covered over.

But the cautionary tale for that is Sears also sold millwork during this period.

A good friend of mine that I grew up with, he took over his parents' house after his mother died, and he gutted the house out and found a Sears packing label on the lumber.

And he said, "Jim, do I have a Sears house?"

[audience chuckles] He did not.

He just had millwork that Sears sold for that particular house.

So, it can be a little bit confusing to track these things down.

And making it even more confusing, companies copied the work of other companies.

So, the design we see in the top left is the Crescent by Sears.

That's their most popular model.

So, they were selling a lot of Crescents, and other companies noticed they were selling a lot Crescents.

So, they made their own Crescents too.

They just didn't call 'em Crescents anymore.

So, the Standards Home Company had a design they called the Cornell.

C.L.

Boaz company had a design that they called Number 1-20-32.

Very evocative name.

The Gordon-Van Tine Company and Montgomery Ward's Company also produced their own designs.

And this is actually the same house, 'cause the houses were produced by Gordon-Van Tine Company and sold by Montgomery Ward's and Gordon-Van Tine.

So, you could buy this house from both of those suppliers, which makes it really very difficult if you're trying to determine whether this house that you see on the street was designed-- was actually bought from Gordon-Van Tine or Montgomery Ward's.

After World War II, there were some dramatic social and economic changes that meant that pattern book houses and their mail order offsprings became a thing of the past.

Over three decades of operation, Sears and Roebuck claimed to have sold over 100,000 houses.

And this is a chart that someone else put together of the major, the largest manufacturers of these houses and their periods of operation.

And I think you can see something very notable when you look at this.

Two of the companies went out with the Depression.

They ended in 1931.

1931 was actually the bottom of the Depression.

That was when it was the worst.

So, they just didn't make it out of the Depression.

You can see a number of other ones, including Sears, didn't make it after World War II.

They produced all the way up to World War II, and when the World War II ended, they stopped producing houses as well.

And then, a couple of them continued onwards.

The Aladdin Homes Company was the longest lived of these companies, going from 1906 until the 1980s before they closed down.

So, what can we learn from this?

How did Sears influence American housing?

There were a number of different consequences.

The nationalization of architectural tastes.

There were catalogs that promoted these designs from Sears and other companies that went to millions of people all across the country.

And the popularity of new designs like the bungalow or the ranch house, they're very strongly driven by these companies including them in their plan books.

Standardization of floor plans.

We talked about the bungalow and the living room, dining room, kitchen, bedroom, bathroom, bedroom arrangement.

That kind of thing goes beyond the catalogs of Sears, into the builders' vocabulary.

And many of you live in bungalows.

They may not have been built by Sears, but, boy, that plan just went everywhere.

Standardization of fabrication.

One of the things that these companies did is they elevated the quality of construction.

Especially during the 1920s and the boom years, there was a term they used at that time called jerry-built.

If you had a jerry-built house, it meant your house was built to a lower standard.

Like, for example, they may not have doubled up the 2x4s over your window and door, the heads of your windows and doors so that eventually, over time, that would sag down and pinch your door or pinch your window.

So, good construction.

They democratized good design and good construction so that the person who bought a $493 house from Sears bought a house that was architect designed.

It had been vetted through architects, engineers, home economics experts, through a whole cadre of people.

It expanded the range of housing choices.

So, all of a sudden, houses that you could not get built locally for any money, you could order out of a catalog and get.

They anticipated the standardization of home mortgages.

The home mortgage as we know it today was really pioneered by these companies and then became standard by the time that the Great Depression came.

And they also created a "do it yourself" home building culture, where people who had not necessarily a lot of skill but some wherewithal could build their house.

One of the companies said, "If you can drive a nail, you can build our house."

You didn't even have to have a saw, right?

Not until you got around to the clapboard.

So, there were a lot of influences that continued onward that are part of the housing industry today that were pioneered by companies like Sears and its ilk.

And that's all I have.

[audience laughs] [audience applauds]