The Mail Order American Dream: An Introductory Guide to Identifying Kit Houses
Hello Friends! Today I will take a break from typical McMansion fare to talk about one of my most requested topics: mail-order houses and how to identify them.
NOTE: This is a long article - for those who wish to open in browser/new tab, now is the time to do so!
So, let’s get started:
Ok, let me get this straight: you could order a house by mail? When was this even a thing?
Before the turn of the 20th century, the detached urban or suburban single-family home was primarily the realm of the upper classes. The lower and middle classes were relegated to townhouses, tenements, or lived and worked in rural, agrarian settings.
The new processes of mass-production meant that the overall cost of homebuilding, along with everything else, was greatly reduced, enabling those in the middle class to purchase and build homes. The invention of the horse-drawn streetcar in 1853, followed by the electric streetcar in 1888, meant that middle-class families could now expand outwards into the first generation of suburbs, the streetcar suburbs.
The streetcar suburb of Friendship, PA. Public Domain
Enter the kit house: a home you could order from a catalog, and have shipped via rail to your building site. Before kit houses, many homes were built from pattern books: collections of house plans with blueprints for skilled contractors and carpenters to follow.
The kit house, a product of mass-production took the pattern-book concept even further. For each kit house, every piece of lumber, siding, doors, windows, columns, etc. were produced to exact precision in a factory, numbered for easy assembly, and sent to the site by rail and delivered to the lot via cart or truck.
Instruction Manual for a Sears Ready Cut Home. Public Domain.
The house was assembled in a paint-by-numbers sort of fashion, with detailed instructions on putting the pieces together. Many kit houses could be assembled within a couple of weeks by a lone carpenter, making the labor costs more affordable to the burgeoning middle class.
Kit houses were incredibly popular among not only the new suburbanites, but also corporations, who bought and built the kits en masse for their company housing.
General view of company-owned mill village - Highland Yarn Mills - High Point, North Carolina, 1936. US National Archives, Public Domain.
Kit houses were at their peak popularity during the years 1908-1930. The Great Depression reduced the number of kit houses (and everything else) dramatically, and many kit house manufacturers ceased production during this time. Still, several companies persisted into the 1950s and 60s. The last kit house company to cease catalog circulation was Liberty Homes in 1973.
Kit houses fell out of popularity in the 50s and 60s due to competition from development companies, who constructed entire neighborhoods en masse via teams of construction workers. The DIY aspect of the kit homes was no longer desirable in a fledgling technological era, where fewer individuals were skilled in the building trades.
Many kit houses are still standing today and continue to make wonderful, durable, desirable homes; and they’re easier to find than one might think.
A Brief Guide to Identifying Kit Houses: Introduction
For the purpose of this guide, I will be using a location I am very familiar with: Greensboro, North Carolina (where I went to college go Spartans woo). During the 4 years I lived in Greensboro, I was obsessed with meticulously cataloging the kit houses in the area after living in one (a 1923 Sears Westly.)
Identifying Kit Houses Step 1: The Three Common Site Locations
One of the easiest ways to begin one’s search for mail order houses is knowing where to look in the first place. Kit Houses are most commonly found in these areas:
1.) First Generation Suburbs (Streetcar and Railroad Suburbs) (1906-1930)
These are the first ring of suburbs, made possible by the streetcar. However, until the burgeoning railroad suburbs began to develop in the 1890s, most houses in the inner-circle of this area were pattern book houses rather than mail order houses. The expansion of the railroad in the 1900s enabled more kit houses to be shipped to new lots.
Streetcar and Railroad suburbs can be easily identified as being outside the city center. The streets are almost entirely in a grid formation. Kit houses from this period were built from approximately 1906-1930.
2.) Company Housing (Near Industrial Sites) (varied)
Many kit houses were built as company housing for industrial sites. Industries where this was common include textile mills, energy production, steel mills, coal mines, and large factories.
In the case of Greensboro, NC, many Sears houses were built outside of the textile mills that used to employ the vast majority of the population before the 1980s. In this example, White Oak Mills, a textile company employing mostly African American workers, can be seen with its remaining company housing.
The ages of these kit houses are closely linked to the age of the industry they serve.
3. First Generation Automobile Suburbs (1915-1940)
These are the suburbs that sprung up when the car became wildly accessible to the middle class around the year 1915, and developed until the end of WWII. These suburbs are also relatively close to either industrial areas or the city core, and can be recognized by their more curvilinear streets.
The main difference between the first generation and the second generation of auto suburbs, is that the 1st generation was not subject to the Federal Housing Administration’s community guidelines, which encouraged cul-de-sacs, dramatically curved streets, and dead ends to deter thru-traffic.
Homes built in these neighborhoods date mostly from the late 1910s through the 1940s.
Step 2: Common Kit House Architectural Styles
Most mail-order houses fall under a certain number of architectural styles popular during the time they were constructed.
The earliest mail order houses came from the Aladdin Homes Company, whose first catalog was issued in 1906. Houses built before 1906 were most likely pattern-book houses or were designed by an architect. Kit houses didn’t become commonplace until 1908, when Sears Roebuck & Co issued their first catalog of Ready-Cut Homes. The houses from this period are often difficult to distinguish from their pattern book counterparts, but it can be done!
Queen Anne Style
This ornate style of architecture popular during the mid-late 1800s was often too expensive and detailed for kit house production; however, early kit houses can be found in a more paired-down interpretation of this style. By the time 1920 rolled around, most kit homes had moved past the Queen Anne into other architectural categories; however, some catalogs include them up until the late 1920s.
More ornate examples:
Note the ornate turret.
This example from Sears features a gambrel roof with a gambrel cross-gable, and is a blend of the Queen Anne and the contemporaneous Shingle styles.
More Commonplace Examples:
Sears Modern Home No. 115 (1908). A simple layout with ornate wooden details. Simple plans like this are sometimes referred to as being of the so-called Farmhouse or National styles, though these names often refer to types of vernacular architecture in the professional literature.
Note the second story window on the Harris Home in the bottom left corner: this window configuration was very common on Queen Anne and Shingle style homes.
American Foursquare
I would wager to say that of all the house plans dating before 1930, the majority of those built were American Foursquares. There are so many different variations of this simple plan that it is almost impossible (with a few exceptions) to tell one from the other from the exterior alone.
Foursquares are essentially boxes, with pyramidal roofs and a central porch. The house may or may not include a dormer, which is usually a shed dormer (on front of the above house) or hipped dormer (seen on the side of the above house.) The style was popular until around 1930, when the Great Depression greatly slashed the size of new homes being built.
Foursquare houses often incorporate architectural details from contemporary styles. The earliest Foursquares show Queen Anne influences. Houses built after 1912 start to show early Craftsman influences.
A.) The Sears Chelsea (1908-1922) was one of Sears’ most popular models.
B.) Note the exposed rafters beneath the eaves; shows early Craftsman influences.
C.) Note the finials (pointy bits on top of roof) = very Queen Anne.
D.) A relatively style-neutral American Foursquare.
Earlier Colonial Revival
“Colonial” is one of those architectural terms that has been bastardized until the end of time. The style this is referring to here is the “Colonial Revival Style” which reached the apex of its popularity in the 1920s-50s, and is one of the longest-running popular architectural styles. These houses are modeled after early historical American and British homes.
Dutch Colonial Revival houses are the easiest to identify, thanks to their gambrel (”barn”) roof. These often intersect with Queen Anne, when they are front-gabled, but side gabled examples (see below) are almost always Colonial Revival.
Colonial Revival houses are almost always side-gabled like the ones above, and commonly feature side porches, porticos, and shutters. Early Colonial Revival houses from the 1910s are sometimes difficult to discern from the more simplistic Queen Anne styles seen earlier.
Early Bungalows
Technically, the construction term ‘bungalow’ refers to a 1 or 1.5 story house. However, when most people talk about bungalows, they are referring to those built in the Craftsman or Prairie traditions, which will be explained later. The Bungalow originated in California as affordable, charming working class housing.
Proto-Craftsman Bungalow from the 1911 Sears Catalog. The brackets (sometimes called bracing, though this is a construction term) beneath the eaves (overhanging roof) are simple. The roof pitch is not low, and the house is front-gabled with simple geometry. The porch columns are influenced by the Shingle Style.
Craftsman Bungalows (1910-1940s)
This was the age of the first generation Craftsman bungalows. The style, popularized by the Craftsman pioneers Greene & Greene, whose 1908 Gamble House was hugely influential in the homebuilding industry. The first Craftsman-influenced bungalow kit house was the 1910 Aladdin Oakland model, inspired by the work produced by the Greene Brothers and others in California.
The first Sears Craftsman bungalow was the Sears Modern Home No. 191, which first appeared in the 1912 Catalog.
Craftsman style-bungalows are easy to identify:
Note the progression of ornamentation from 1915 to 1920:
“Two-Story” Bungalows
One of the most popular types of kit homes! Sears has some famous models, most notably the Westly.
Sears Westly (1913-1929)
Craftsman-Influenced American Foursquares
The Craftsman style was infectious, and spread quickly to American Foursquare houses. Examples below:
Prairie Style American Foursquares
However, it was the Prairie Style, popularized in Chicago by Frank Lloyd Wright and his contemporaries that was easily incorporated into the simplicity of the American Foursquare.
Frank Lloyd Wright’s Ingalls House (1909) by Teemu008 (CC-BY-SA 2.0)
Prairie-Style houses are characterized by their low-pitched hipped rooflines and wide, overhanging eaves. Unlike the Craftsman style, Prairie-style eaves are enclosed, with no ornamental brackets or rafters.
While Craftsman-style houses and bungalows remained popular until the late 30s, the 20s represented a more streamlined era of house design, with the Colonial Revival style becoming more and more popular.
English influences, such as the Tudor style were present in new Revivals, and a fascination with Spanish Colonial architecture resulted in some rather strange interjections.