The Mail Order American Dream Part II: The Hunt is On! An Extremely In-Depth Guide to Finding That House
Hello Friends! I’ve gotten a number of amazing emails about last week’s post on kit houses, and have decided (after many requests) to write a more in-depth guide to picking out mail order houses in the wild, using a few examples from my own hunt in Greensboro, North Carolina.
THIS IS A LONG ARTICLE. NOW IS THE TIME TO OPEN IN A NEW TAB OR OUTSIDE THE TUMBLR APP.
Preparing for Battle: Gathering Online and Print Resources
Like most obscure things in the world, there are several online communities for kit houses and their identification, and these communities have been very active in putting resources such as old catalogs online.
Here is a brief list of really helpful resources to get you started:
Online
1.) Comprehensive list of mail order home catalogs available online.
2.) Plans from AntiqueHomeStyle.com and AntiqueHome.org (these include some regional companies like Southern Pine Co. as well as materials on interiors and pattern book houses.
3.) The Daily Bungalow on Flickr - a valuable resource for supplemental material. Most (but not all) of the catalogs on this page are listed chronologically in Source 1.
4.) Complete Index of Aladdin Home Catalogs - every Aladdin catalog printed is available here. Totally worth a tab of its own.
5.) Sears’ Master List of Confirmed Sears Houses
Books
1.) Houses By Mail: A Guide to Houses from Sears, Roebuck & Co.
If your interest in mail order houses is more than a passing fancy, I recommend picking this book up, as it’s a handy and comprehensive guide organized by roof shape.
If you don’t feel like purchasing the book, Dale Hynes has put together Pinterest boards organizing the Sears houses in the same way as the book, and has an extra collection of houses not included in the guide.
2.) Houses from Books: Treatises, Pattern Books, and Catalogs in American Architecture, 1738-1950 by Daniel D. Reiff
If you’re serious about getting into the kit house game, this book is for you. It has great historical facts, and most importantly, examples of kit houses from the catalogs and how they’re built in real life. I recommend ordering this book directly from Penn State Press rather than Amazon, as it’ll save you $30 and the shipping is pretty rapid. My book came a mere two days after I ordered it.
Step 1: So You Think You’re Looking at a Kit House - Preliminary Signs
Location
If you remember from last week, kit homes are commonly found in 3 places:
1.) First Generation Suburbs (streetcar and railway)
For the purpose of this article, I’m going to use the neighborhood of College Hill, an early streetcar suburb of Greensboro. College Hill is outlined in red and is the bottom right with an arrow pointing at it saying ‘oldest suburbs’.
2.) Near industrial sites (as company housing)
3.) First Generation Auto Suburbs
BUT this is not always the case! Some kit houses were built as farmhouses on the outskirts of cities or in rural areas. It’s a case by case basis, which is why identifying kit houses is so fun!
Architectural Style
Last week, we went over styles that were common for kit houses, and if there are many houses of these styles grouped together, you might be looking at a kit house community!
You might also be looking at a pattern-book house community, which is more difficult to discern, because the execution of pattern book houses was left to the individual contractors and carpenters, and each local carpenter had their own style and flourishes.
Queen-Anne style houses, for example are more likely to be pattern book houses than kit houses because the height of their popularity was right before the beginning of mail order houses, though certain models ran as late as the 1930s, as we shall see.
Repetition
You might think you’re looking at a kit house neighborhood because you are looking at many houses that appear to be duplicates of each other. Houses that are identical or nearly identical to each other may be the most incriminating sign that you are looking at a kit house community, though pattern books may again be at fault.
Step 2: Pinpointing the House on a Map
1.) The Address
You cannot, I repeat, cannot identify whether or not a house was a kit house unless you have the address. If you are leaving the area where the house was found, write down the street name before you go, and fill out the details later via Google Maps.
For example, I’m going to use the example of 304 Tate Street, a house seen below.
2.) Getting photos at multiple angles
A good idea when looking to identify a house is to get multiple pictures: one from the front, and at least one from the side. This picture suffices because it is at an oblique angle, and details such as window layout can be seen clearly. The more complex a house is, the more angles you should try and capture.
(A good idea is to take screenshots in Google Street View.)
Step 3: Finding Your County’s Public Records
Unfortunately, most counties’ public records websites are difficult to locate, as they are usually pushed way down in search results by for-profit services. Here are some tricks for finding your county’s public records site without having to scour through several unhelpful and poorly-designed government websites.
1. Google the house’s address. If you see a result from Zillow or another real estate aggregator, click on it.
(I recommend Zillow because their layout is a little more detailed.)
Important: check Zillow to see if the house is currently a rental. This is important later on. In this case, it is a rental.
2. Scroll down until you see a little link saying “county website” or something similar. Click on this link.
3. A really ugly website will come up looking something like this. You will often see a row of links for different statistics. Click on one that says “Buildings”, “structures” or something similar.
4. Congrats! You’ve found a page just about your house! The best part is, you can find other records much more easily now. Somewhere at the top of your page, you will see something like “New Search.”
Open this link in a new tab, and keep it handy for quickly searching for different addresses. It should look something like this:
Bookmark this page for easy access if you’re searching for more than one kit house.
Step 4: Interpreting Your House’s Public Records
Go back to your house’s Building’s page.
We’re going to go over this page step by step in order to use this resource to the highest of its abilities.
A.) The Year Built
RULE NUMBER 1: HOUSES BUILT BEFORE 1908 ARE NOT MAIL-ORDER HOUSES. They are probably pattern book houses.
This is literally the most important piece of information in identifying kit houses. Without a date, it’s game over, as architectural styles last a lot longer than individual kit house models. You may be thinking you’re looking at your house, but if you don’t know the date, you could be 10 or 20 years off.
B.) Remodeling and Additions
You know what this means: you’re looking at a house that’s not gonna look exactly like it does in the catalog. This is important. A lot of people get caught up in the idea that the kit house should match the catalog perfectly, when this is almost never the case. In this case, the house has 3 additions. Fortunately, additions are often in the back of the house, so the front facade should remain relatively unchanged.
We can reveal a lot from the fact that the renovations were done in 1979. This can mean a number of things:
- Many of the renovations were probably upgrades such as central air and heating
- Additions dating from an earlier time period (10-20 years after the house was built) are much more dangerous, because these were often aesthetic upgrades made so the house fit in more with the styles of the time. Additions from the 70s and after were most likely mechanical or safety improvements.
- If the house is for rent, many of the adjustments may have been for the purpose of subdividing a house into apartments. In this case, the remodeling is interior. Common changes made by landlords when they turn a single family home into a multi-family dwelling include:
- Removing fireplaces. In the screenshot, you’ll see a bit that says “Interior Adj.”: One Fireplace (1). This more often refers to removing or sealing off a fireplace than adding one, especially if the place is being rented out to college students.
- Adding onto the back of the bottom story of a house. This is common because it’s the easiest way to create more space for less money.
- Enclosing all or part of a front or rear porch. Again, this is an easy way to add livable/rentable square-footage.
C. Main and Addition Summary
Scroll down to the bottom of the page, and you should see a bit that looks like this. This is also a very helpful tidbit that will help in your identification:
This image lists the main structure along with all of the additions and their square footage, and their codes.
Here is how to read this image:
Basically, those little squares represent parcels of square-footage not found in the original blueprints, which helps a lot when looking at the plans in the house catalogs. The original dimensions of the house was 26 feet x 33 feet, as can be gleamed by the table and simple math.
D. Other Info (not as helpful)
These represent the current stats of the house, and not necessarily the original house plans, so they’re not as useful as the other data available.
Step 5: Finding Your House - Catalog Time!
Okay, here’s the fun part, especially if you like millions of tabs. A good start is opening each of the online sources listed at the beginning of the article, in a new tab. Especially this one.
For SEARS HOUSES:
Have your copy of Houses By Mail or Dale’s Pinterest Page open to make quick work of the Sears catalog houses, which could otherwise take forever. These resources sort the houses by their shape, making comparison easy.
Each house has the catalog dates and model numbers, making elimination a breeze.
A.) For each non-Sears source, open the catalogs corresponding to the date your house was built in new tabs.
For example, my house was built in 1920. I would open each catalog from 1920 in a new tab. If you can’t find a specific catalog for your house year, (e.g. there’s no Montgomery Ward catalog for 1920), a good idea is to use the catalog from 1 or 2 years before the given date.
BUT KATE - Which companies should I include in my Search???? There are so Many! I would start with those whose business extended coast to coast. If you live on the West Coast, there are several resources for West Coast homes from AntiqueHomeStyle.com and AntiqueHome.org. For now, ignore pattern books.
Here are companies who should be included in your table:
- Sears
- Aladdin
- Harris
- Wardway (Montgomery Ward)
- Lewis
- Gordon Van Tine
- Sterling
- Bennett
Bolded ones are the most common.
B.) Make a Table for easy elimination
A good strategy for quick and easy elimination is to make a table with the following values as columns:
House Year
Address
Style (e.g. 1 story craftsman; foursquare)
(n number of columns for names of companies, so one column for Sears, one for Aladdin, one for Harris, etc.) Once a catalog is exhausted, if the plan was found, write the name in this columns; if not, x it out.
Notes
C.) If you have multiple models that look similar (we’ll get to this in a second.)
Either open similar images in new tabs and flip through them, or copy and paste the images (taking screenshots is your friends) into a document along with the pictures of the original house. For example:
Step 6: Confirming Your Identification
Sometimes, it’s really easy to find the house you’re looking for. In the case of 304 Tate Street, a rather unusual house, I found it staring back at me from the pages of a Bennett Homes catalog, virtually untouched.
As we can see, there are some things that are slightly off, such as the windows on the side. The spacing between them is accurate once you take into account the different angles of the pictures. The dimensions match those from the chart earlier, ignoring the additions.
Things that are different: the house on Tate Street was built into a hill, which explains the different foundation. The columns are slightly different, but the placement is correct. The Tate Street house omitted the exposed rafters, a stylistic - not structural - decision.
A.) The Importance of Plans
Here’s an example that isn’t so easy but also isn’t impossible.
Spoilers, it’s this house:
You’re probably saying, “no it’s not, idiot.” It’s true,
This is the difficulty of identifying a kit house that has been heavily modified from the original.
First of all, the plan is mirrored from the original, a common switch at the time of construction. Many catalogs provided mirrored versions of their plans. (Hence why the chimney is on the opposite side.)
The distinctiveness of elements such as the closed eaves and the overall layout of the house (with additions) compared to the plan, makes a confirmed spotting of this mail order house from Lewis Manufacturing, Co, built in 1920.
The entirety of the porch has been closed in and another room has been added to the front of the house.
During reroofing, the roofer chose not include the bit of roof that splits the first and second story of the cross-gable, leaving an indentation on both sides where that strip of roof used to be.
All of the windows have been replaced, leaving no originals. This happens frequently, as windows with the dimensions of the originals became rare, or too expensive to have custom built. The result is remodeling the house around more standard contemporary window shapes. This is how windows with three mullions get split into two, as can be seen on the side of the house.
B.) The Importance of Dates
Here’s another example. This one is recreated from page 276 of Daniel Reiff’s book Houses from Books. The heavily-modified house, a confirmed Sears Modern Home No. 170, built in 1915, is seen here with the original catalog drawing.
The point is, a remodeled kit house can look nothing like the original.
What makes it even more difficult is when the renovations do not change to the square footage or the mechanical systems of a home, leaving them unreported by public records. Often, small changes made to update the exterior of a home to a more popular style (often from newer house catalogs!) are difficult to trace.
Here are a list of things that are the most likely to be different from the catalog picture and the plans:
- Building materials and colors.
- Front porch layout (e.g. number of columns and their spacing/style)
- Window size and style. Most kit house windows are almost never original.
- Number of windows and window layout (such as omitting a middle window, or adding sidelights.)
- Removal of small windows.
- Enclosed porches
- Removal of fireplaces (not necessarily chimney)
- Chimney that is originally internal is moved to an exterior wall, which was less expensive to build back in the day.
- Architectural details. Craftsman columns can now be Tuscan. Exposed rafters can be enclosed.
- Plan is mirrored or partially mirrored.
- Balconies removed/enclosed.
- Carport or port cochere added
Here’s a list of things least likely to be different from the catalog picture and plans:
- Removal of dormers
- Removal of chimney
- Total removal of porches
- large changes in rooflines/roof structure
Chances are, if the side windows of the house look totally different from the original drawing, it’s more likely that you have the wrong identification. This is especially the case with Craftsman bungalows.
I leave you with one final example recreated from Reiff (p. 286). This house, built in 1909-10 was remodeled in 1929 to look like the Aladdin Standard.
This is why dates are SO IMPORTANT. House plans cannot travel back in time. If the plan dates after the house was built, the house is not built from that plan.
Well folks, there you have it.
I hope this has helped y’all with your kit house identification, as much as it has helped me streamline my own search.
Stay tuned for Thursday’s house roast FROM ALASKA. Yes, there are McMansions in Alaska. Next very special surprise McMansion Hell post that many of y’all have been asking for for months now.
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Copyright Disclaimer: unless otherwise, pictures are from the Public Domain.
