Sears Modern Homes: The 30,000 Piece Houses Sold by Mail Order

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Between 1908 and 1942, Sears sold more than 70,000 houses through its catalog, each one arriving at the local train depot as 25 tons of material in a boxcar. The idea began in 1906 as a fix for a corporate headache: manager Frank W. Kushel was stuck with an unprofitable building materials department and warehouses full of lumber, nails, and millwork. He proposed bundling it all into complete homes. The first Book of Modern Homes offered 44 styles priced from $360 to $2,890, and families raised the walls themselves with help from neighbors.

This episode explains the engineering that made amateur builders possible, from balloon framing held together with standard nails to pre-cut lumber stamped with codes that matched the blueprints. It also follows the decision that nearly undid the program: Sears became its customers' mortgage lender in 1912, sales peaked in 1929, and the Depression turned a trusted retailer into the company foreclosing on families. The sales records were later destroyed, which is why identifying a Sears house today takes detective work.

Pre-cut, numbered framing lumber arrived in 1916 and cut construction time by up to 40 percent.
In 1918 Standard Oil bought 149 Sears homes for about $1 million to house mine workers in Carlinville, Illinois, the largest known bulk order.
The Magnolia, a two-story southern colonial, was the most expensive model, and only seven are known to be standing.
Sears liquidated $11 million in defaulted mortgage debt and ended its mortgage program in 1933.
Stamped lumber alone does not prove a Sears house, since rivals like Aladdin, Gordon-Van Tine, and Montgomery Ward's Wardway used the same system.

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