Sears Mail Order Homes

[Mellifluous]

This is pretty neat - I never realized that Sears did this at one point in time!

http://www.searsarchives.com/homes/1908-1914.htm

[CarolU]

Wow...did you see those prices????

[Barbwire]

I'd love to see pics of those houses as they look now. I wonder if they were built to last or not.

[Mellifluous]

I'd love to see pics of those houses as they look now. I wonder if they were built to last or not.

here are some of the houses that have been documented in Libertyville

http://cdm.digitalpast.org/cdm4/exhibits/MailOrderHouses/HousesInLibertyville.htm

[Linda Y]

I may be mistaken, but I think that is where the term 'Craftsman Home' came from. If you look at some of those models, you will see that they are classic Craftsman.
What a neat site!

[cowboy ed]

heck yeah, mel. there was a time when you could get ANYTHING from Sears, Roebuck & Co.

[Jasfino]

Those are pretty neat... :D

[CarolU]

Amazing. A lot of the houses look very familiar. I don't think there is a mining or farming town in Utah without several of them.

[reuben T]

I'd rather suspect they were a good bit more solid than a lot of modern houses. Some of the current materials going into houses seems awful flimsy to me. I'm purty sure it was a couple of my grandmothers brothers that were building those houses for sears. They were supposedly the first ones in modern time to come up with a pre-fab design, and I think I remember someone saying they were the ones dealing with sears. It was one of her uncles that built the first floating steel dredge for dredging rivers. And one of her sons, (an uncle of mine that I've worked with/for) has followed along and been a building contractor most of his life. She was born in 1899 living in a tent in NW Indiana, and her father ran what was probably the first portable sawmill which he ran with a steam engine, and used the engine to pull a string of wagons with mill and household from farm to farm.
It was sears that sold the david bradley brand of garden & farm equipment, the old hay rake i got from the scrap yard and used for a number of years was a david bradley.

[motorgypsy]

My grandparents bought and built one of the Sears houses. They were really an innovation in their time. My father-in-law always says he bought his driver's license from Sears too - but then again he said a lot of things! ;-) ;-) ;-)

[Palomino_Lover]

Now where is that kind of inovation found today? I sadly don't see it happening in this country.

[Linda Y]

Modular homes. There are quite a few of them here. Granted, I doubt they are as well built as the Sears homes. But neither are most of the stick builts.
Went to an expo that was exibiting the modulars, and they are quite beautiful.