Sears mail-order homes prove plentiful in Western Pennsylvania

If home is where the heart is, then those living in houses built from Sears’ mail-order kits may have fallen head-over-heels.

A recent Tribune-Review story about a 1922 Sears mail-order home in McCandless that has most of its original features intact drew scores of letters and comments from Pittsburgh area residents interested in learning more about the unique role these houses played in U.S. history.

In the story, homeowner Alicia Dallago said she had no idea the home she bought in 1998 was built from a kit.

Between 1908 and 1940, Sears, Roebuck and Co. sold nearly 75,000 kit homes through its Modern Homes program, which featured 447 styles of houses, ranging from large multistory dwellings to tiny summer cottages with an optional outhouse.

Among those chiming in about the article was Judith Chabot of St. Louis, Mo., who runs SearsHouseSeekers.com, which serves as a depository for information gathered by Sears home enthusiasts across the country.

“We thought it might be of interest to those readers to point out some more of the history of Sears houses in the greater Pittsburgh area,” said Chabot, whose family still owns a Sears Silverdale model home in Northampton, Mass., that was built by her great-grandparents in 1911.

It wasn’t until she was in her 20s that Chabot learned about the home’s history.

“My uncle mentioned that he had found some shipping labels from Sears in the house and when we asked my grandmother about it, she said: ‘Oh, yes, we ordered it from the Sears catalog,’” Chabot said.

“I was intrigued by the concept of people picking out a house from a catalog,” she said. “I love finding these houses and learning more about them, the different models that were sold and the people who bought them.”

Chabot said while Sears wasn’t the first or only company to sell mail-order homes, they were unique among the competition.

“Other companies such as Aladdin sold mail-order homes, but that’s all they sold,” Chabot said. “I think the reason the Sears house is so interesting is that most people associate them with the Wish Book catalog that came in the mail at Christmas. I thought it was very interesting when I learned that you could also buy a house from their catalogs.”

Chabot focuses her research on scouring mortgages and deed records, old newspaper articles and other sources to identify kit homes sold by Sears.

The group has identified nearly 540 of the estimated 1,000 Sears mail-order homes that are believed to have been constructed in the region.

Statewide, about 1,900 Sears catalog homes have been identified.

“Our research team especially loves searching Pennsylvania for Sears houses because there are so many there,” Chabot said. “Our national database of Sears houses in the U.S. has over 13,500 homes on it, and, after Ohio and Illinois, Pennsylvania is No. 3 in U.S. with, at today’s count, 1,963 Sears homes found.”

The group has identified 2,700 Sears homes in Ohio and 2,300 in Illinois. New York ranks fourth on the list with 1,679.

While Sears no longer has records of where each of the nearly 75,000 mail-order homes it sold were built, it does main an extensive archive of the models that were available as well as the history of its Modern Homes division.

Chabot can help people identify if their home was built from a Sears kit if they provide her with an address of the property through the House Seekers website, which also has links to catalogs produced by the company and other sellers.

Chabot notes that Sears’ mail-order homes sold before 1916 did not use precut lumber that was stamped with numbers to guide construction. Instead, shipping labels were affixed to the backside of trim that identified properties.

Homes built after 1916 can be identified as Sears kit homes by numbers stamped on the timbers.

Normajean Moser of McCandless owns a Walton model that was purchased from the Sears Modern Home catalog.

“I have seen articles throughout the years about Sears homes in the Pittsburgh area,” she wrote after reading the Trib story. “I know of several other models in McCandless. But articles are so scattered by time, date and location that it is difficult to realize the scope and number of Sears homes here in the Pittsburgh area.”

Local Sears house enthusiast Karen DeJeet, who owns a Hamilton model in Forest Hills and is a member of the Sears House Finder team, has already done much of the work identifying the mail-order homes still standing in the region.

A number of those homes are featured on the organization’s website.

Melissa Steel of Patterson Heights in Beaver County said the story about the Sears house in McCandless sparked fond memories of the family next door who lived in one for many years.

“They raised four kids in that house,” Steel wrote. “It’s as sturdy as a house as I’ve ever seen. They kept up with it, of course, but it sure has good bones. All these years later it is still a fortress.”

Molly Harbst of Munhall sent along photos of her beautifully preserved Sears homes — a 1920 model called The Crescent — after reading the article.

She said she also didn’t know it was a mail-order house when she bought it 14 years ago.

“I just loved the look of it,” she said. “I’ve visited New Orleans several times and love the style of the buildings there. My home reminds me of that type of architecture.”

Harbst said it wasn’t until after she bought the house that she learned homes were once sold through mail-order catalogs.

She searched the Sears Home archive until she found a catalog with a photo and description of her home.

Harbst said many of the original features in her home are intact and the exterior remains mostly unchanged.

“There haven’t been any major structural changes,” she said. “The windows, the kitchen and the bathroom were updated over the years, but it is still very much the house it was when it was built.”

While researching the property, Harbst learned it was among the first homes built in the borough’s Homestead Park neighborhood.

“It’s kind of exciting to learn that your home is unique because of the way it was bought and constructed,” she said. “And it led me to dig a little deeper into the history of my community.”