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If your house was constructed within the corporate limits of a city, a building permit may have been required. A few lucky homeowners have been able to find the original building permits which listed Sears as the architect or as the builder. The numbers “2 – 8” were stenciled on the drip cap above one window. In addition, it was marked “Drip Cap #3” using a dark blue grease pencil. This drip cap is a great example of marked lumber that you might be able to find in your Sears house.
Lustron Homes in Columbus, Ohio offered house kits completely comprised of porcelain-coated steel. Hundreds of kit homes are located in our region of the country. Its first house plan book, The Book of Building Plans , offered plans for twenty-four houses and several agricultural outbuildings. In 1917, the company introduced “Wardway” prefabricated houses. Sears offered “reversed floor plans”, so the house may be a mirrored image of the floor plan shown in the catalogs. Every piece of framing lumber for a kit house was numbered at the factory for easy assembly at the construction site.
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At a plant located near Newark, New Jersey, Sears measured and precut the lumber for each home. They stenciled numbers onto the boards or hand labeled the lumber using grease pencils which were usually dark blue. The lumber mill would then bundle all of the pieces together and ship it via box car. The delivery included a 75-page book with assembly instructions. Montgomery Ward began closing departments that were no longer profitable to survive the Great Depression, and with the lost revenue from unpaid mortgages and decreasing sales, Wardway prefabricated houses were discontinued in 1931.
The kit houses were also based on the styles of houses being built, so it can be sometimes difficult to determine the origin of the house. But below is a list of signs that can help identify a kit house. Dale Wolicki lists Saturday Evening Post, National Geographic, and Good Housekeeping as examples of nationwide magazines where Gordon-VanTine advertised. Prospective customers could arrange to inspect kit houses in their vicinity or visit a company's factory to tour model homes. Much of the profit in the kit home business came from the mortgage financing that accompanied the sale, not the materials or the house itself.
Design
The introduction of drywall in 1917 removed the need for the amateur home builder to hire a plasterer to finish the walls thereby making the erection of a Sears kit house even cheaper and easier. Sears even provided its own brand of drywall with house kits after that. From 1909 through 1932, Montgomery Ward sold more than 32,000 houses this way as did smaller companies including Harris Brothers Homes in Chicago.
The mortgage program would prove to be the Wardway brand’s undoing, however, when the financial difficulties of the Great Depression left many customers unable to make their mortgage payments. Wardway Homes had sales offices in Chicago , Fort Worth, Kansas City, Portland and St. Paul. But unlike most of the other major kit house producers, Montgomery Ward never owned or operated lumber yards that cut and packaged kit houses.
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For example, in 1928 Walt Disney and his brother Roy built two kit houses made by Pacific Ready Cut Homes on lots they owned in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles. Since the kit houses were often assembled by inexperienced homeowners, Sears often made it easy to assemble complex joints like where a baseboard along a stairway joined a baseboard along the floor. Instead of having the homeowner assemble a complex miter, many Sears homes used a simple rectangular wood block as shown above to make that transition. It was a simple trick that is common in Sears homes, but that trick was also used by other builders and there are Sears houses that do not use the blocks. Unfortunately, there is not a great deal of knowledge about the history of Montgomery Ward's kit home business.
Some old houses may have been remodeled more than once. If you find a home similar to yours and the website provides the name of the home model, then look for it in a Sears home catalog. If you find a house like yours in a Sears Home catalog, check out the floor plan. If it is a two-story house, check out the floor plans for both floors. Be sure to remember that the floor plan could be flipped or slightly altered by remodeling. Montgomery Ward & Co. sold kit houses just like Sears did.
The picture to the right shows an example of a Harris Brothers home called “The Harris Model 6.” This home appeared in the 1913 – 1915 Harris Brothers Homes catalog. The Vagabond Historian is a scholar of local history, specializing in knowledge of early American history. Popular as a speaker, he has graciously agreed to contribute his column to Pickerington Online. For now, we hope you enjoy some of the content from our c.
There are Sears home models that do not appear in any of the catalogs that Sears has posted online. For those you need to use the “photo search” function on the Google Lens app. However, finding a home similar to yours in a Sears catalog does not guarantee that yours is a Sears house.
Note that for most kit models, I’ve posted only one plan. That doesn’t mean that Wardway only made that model for one year. But for those models that seemed to be more popular, I added a few photos for reader ease. Scanning the internet I found over 25 different models of American Foursquare homes offered by Wardway Homes as pictured below. Some jurisdictions keep original building permits and on the building permits, there should be information about the date of construction and the architect. Sears Roebuck, Aladdin, Montgomery Ward, etc. might be listed.
Over the years, we have removed all of the half-inch iron pipe that originally weaved through the house to provide gas for those lights. Unfortunately, none of the lighting or plumbing fixtures were still in the house. However, your home may contain some original Sears hardware. If the house still contains the original cast iron bathtub, it may be marked with a circle containing the letters “SR” for Sears – Roebuck.
1930 catalog, which was probably the last catalog Montgomery Ward produced.
This house in Northfield is a perfect match to the Montgomery Ward Kenwood, except it is lacking a clipped gable roof . The double window in the front has been replaced by a bay window, likely after initial construction. The logos might be seen on doorknobs, hinges, miscellaneous hardware. Sears lumber was marked with a letter and number on the tall side of the lumber and can be found two to ten inches from the end of the member.
This explains why many Gordon-Van Tine and Montgomery Ward designs are effectively identical. Gordon-Van Tine ceased production of Wardway homes in 1931. Owning a home where you can unwind and relax can be one of life’s most rewarding experiences. But homeownership can also be challenging and stressful, especially with old houses.
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