Sears prefab homes still standing in region, across the country
Celeste Van Kirk/Observer-Reporter
One of the surviving Sears kit homes stands along Oak Springs Road in Chartiers Township.
Bill and Diana Zoeller’s dog Bear stands on the original flooring inside their Craftsman home.
An April 1955 photo of the Zoeller home shows the siding now painted white instead of the original wood color.
“Grandpa always ordered everything out of a catalog,” said Frank Guzel, who lives just outside Canonsburg in Chartiers Township.
That, believe it or not, included his house.
Celeste Van Kirk/Observer-Reporter
A Sears kit home on Oak Springs Road in Chartiers Township is owned by Frank Guzel. His grandfather built it in 1928.
Its components arrived on the back of a truck that came rumbling up Oak Spring Road in 1928. A farmer, Guzel’s grandfather dug out the foundation himself, but the abode was otherwise a cinch to assemble. Everything that came on the truck was labeled, and it was quickly erected.
“Pap had some guys come in and they had it all built,” Guzel explained.
Almost 90 years later, it’s still standing and, as Guzel tells it, as sturdy as ever.
The catalog Guzel’s grandfather ordered the house from was a Sears catalog.
An ad for a kit home in a 1919 Sears Modern Homes Catalog
The Amazon of its time, the Sears catalog was once a staple in American homes, as weighty as a pre-Internet metropolitan phone book and bursting with goods that might well have been impossible to find in the country’s more remote crossroads. The Spring 1910 catalog, for instance, comes in at over 1,100 pages and includes everything from buggy whips and poultry netting to binoculars, sewing machines, wool wursted suits (“Smart Styles for Smart Dressers”) and the complete works of Charles Dickens. Sears’ ubiquity across the American landscape once seemed unassailable. Just about every home had an appliance or tools from Sears in it, and it was as omnipresent in malls as Orange Julius stands or Gap outlets.
Once a colossus on the retail landscape, Sears is staggering to what could be the end of its life. Reeling from the rise of big-box retailers like Walmart and Costco and the explosion of online shopping, the entity that now owns Sears and Kmart stores has been steadily putting padlocks on some locations over the last couple of years, and there has been speculation a cheerless holiday season could be the blow that finally sends Sears to the canvas.
For all the durability of its washing machines or table saws, the homes ordered from Sears that still dot the American landscape could still end up being the retailer’s most enduring legacy. The company sold an estimated 75,000 of them between 1908 and 1940, when it got out of the housing business thanks to the Great Depression. Because the company’s records on where and when houses were sold have long-since vanished, it’s not known precisely how many still stand. There are many throughout the Pittsburgh region, and at least a handful in Washington County, from the city of Washington to Scenery Hill, Deemston in the Mon Valley, and outside Claysville.
“These were good houses, built to exacting standards and with quality lumber, millwork and materials,” according to Illinois-based author Rosemary Thornton in her book, “Finding the Houses that Sears Built.” “Most of the designs were practical, attractive and affordable. Secondly, these homes were a sound value. Buyers could create equities of $500 to $2,500 (or about 30 percent) by building their own kit home. And Sears promised a man of average abilities could assemble one of these kit homes in 90 days or less. It was the Great American Dream wrapped up in a tidy package with 30,000 pieces.”
Holly Tonini/Observer-Reporter
Holly Tonini/Observer-Reporter
It has some modern changes, like new siding and windows, but Bill and Diana Zoeller’s home in East Finley Township was a kit home from a Sears catalog.
There were about 400 different styles of homes Sears sold, sporting such names as “The Argyle,” “The Crescent,” “The Hamilton,” “The Kilbourne” and “The Sherburne.” The 1922 Sears catalog listing for the Crescent, a one-story home, promised a five-room dwelling for either $1,855 or $2,228 ($27,235 and $32,712 in 2017 dollars), with Sears furnishing, among other things, the millwork, kitchen cupboard, flooring, shingles, porch screens and lumber to build the structure. The catalog offered two floor plans, and stated, “To the folks who like a touch of individuality with good taste, the Crescent makes a special appeal.”
Holly Tonini/Observer-Reporter
The living room of Bill and Diana Zoeller’s home in East Finley Township
If a buyer decided one of the quick-to-construct Sears homes would work for them and their families, they could visit a “Modern Homes” office where they could go through the loan process, or carry it out by mail after requesting a separate home catalog. Once a buyer settled on a home, they would contact Sears for a quote and make a down payment. From there, the first boxcar would arrive in a few weeks.
According to Andrew Mutch, a suburban Detroiter who maintains a website on Sears kit homes with his wife, Wendy, “The loan process was amazingly simple.” Sears would ask only a few questions, such as what a buyer did for a living and where they planned to build, sidestepping questions about race, gender and country of origin. “At a time when most financial institutions wouldn’t finance loans for women, African-Americans and recent immigrants, Sears did and made the American Dream possible for these families.”
An undated photo shows original home owner Dorthy Knox with her son George on the steps of their Craftsman home in East Finley Township. George’s daughter, Diana Zoeller, and her husband Bill now live in the home.
Prices were competitive because of the high volume of building materials Sears purchased. They would be shipped to a locality by railroad, and then transported by truck. As indoor plumbing, central heating and electricity became more common, Sears added those features. The company also emphasized you didn’t need to be a skilled builder in order to assemble one of their homes. With the lumber having been pre-cut, the framing lumber was stamped with numbers that corresponded with blueprints that showed where the lumber was supposed to go. A 75-page instruction book was also included.
The majority of homes sold by Sears were in the Northeast and Midwest, partially due to the growth of cities and suburbs in those regions during the first decades of the 20th century, and also because Sears was based in Chicago, as were Montgomery Ward and Harris Brothers, which also were in the “kit home” business. Pennsylvania is among the five states where the greatest number of Sears homes were built, and, according to Mutch, hundreds have been identified around the Pittsburgh region, “and I’m sure there are many, many more to be found.”
A handwritten description on the back of this 1970 photo reads, “Scene of sheep feeding on a cold January morning at home of Clyde M. Knox.”
The home in Deemston shared by Jim and Marilou Webeck is one of them. The two-story, two-bedroom home was built in 1909, with its elements arriving by train to Fredericktown, “and it was put together by the local lumberyard,” Marilou Webeck explained. It’s been in the Webeck family for 80 years and, after more than a century, it’s holding up well.
“Oh, absolutely,” Marilou said. “We haven’t done much to it. We’re not remodelers. The way his grandparents lived 50 years ago, we live now.”
In East Finley Township, Bill and Diana Zoeller have a Sears kit home that was built in 1936. Diana’s grandparents had it built with the help of a contractor and the original hardwood floors are still intact.
The youngest of the kit homes, like the one owned by the Zoellers, are now 80 years-old or approaching that milestone, but Mutch believes the prefabricated homes that Sears brought to the market have had a lasting influence. They “planted the idea of the modern subdivision development where homeowners are offered a set of pre-designed homes versus hiring an architect to design one for them.”
Could anyone ever try to attempt a similar venture?
“I’m sure there’s someone at Amazon who’s looked at this concept,” Mutch said. “I would expect the modern version of the ‘kit house’ to be largely constructed in a factory and then assembled on site. There are some companies that are doing that on a smaller scale, but no one is yet doing it on a scale that Sears and their competitors did.”