Sears' house kits foreshadowed home improvement

Home Channel News, Oct 25, 1999 by Kate Griffin

At the turn of the century, hardware stares sprung up wherever enough people could support them, and they served the needs of those people for a place where they could buy building and farming products.

For example, N.A. Mans & Sons, the Trenton, Mich.-based dealer that now operates nine stores, originally was a coal business that developed into a lumber and building material supplier. "The business was started by my grandfather. He didn't even have a yard; instead, orders were placed at the local drugstore, then the coal was delivered by horse and wagon," said Mike Mans, vp of the company founded in 1900.

A decade or so later the business became a lumberyard that also sold coal shipped in by rail. The coal side of the business was phased out in the late 1940s and early 1950s with the advent of natural gas, Mans said. "We have evolved quite a bit from selling coal out of a horse wagon," said Mans of the business now entering a fourth generation of family ownership.

One of the nation's first home center retailers had its roots in Youngstown, Ohio, where a store called Youngstown Hardware opened in 1846, half a dozen years before the railroad came to the small mining and farming community of 1,200 people. Initially selling carpenter tools, gun barrels, buggy parts and hay forks to local residents, the store by the late 1960s became Stambaugh-Thompson, a fixture in the Buckeye State. Only a few years ago, the store was sold to a group of investors that has converted the operation into a lively convenience-store format now called Stambaugh Hardware.

The building of the nation's railroad system had a strong impact on the way home improvement and building materials were sold in the early 1900s, helping give birth to mail-order merchants that could ship merchandise to rural and other hard-to-reach places by rail.

The best known, at least these days, is Sears, Roebuck & Co. -- formed in 1886 by railroad agent turned-watch salesman Richard Sears and his repairman, Alvah Roebuck.

By the time Sears came into existence, farmers were selling their crops for cash and buying goods from rural general stores. But the stores hiked their retail prices significantly from wholesale. For instance, in 1881 the wholesale price of a barrel of flour was reportedly $3.47, while price at retail was at least $7. Farmers' discontent created an opening for Sears and other mail-order companies that used the railroads, post office and volume buying to serve as an alternative to the overpriced rural stores.

By the turn of the century, Sears was selling windows, doors, moldings and other building products along with its selection of wedding gowns, baby buggies, watches, medicine and musical instruments. Sears also started drifting into the business of selling full houses.

The first catalog displaying a line of complete "Modern Homes" appeared in Sears' general catalog for spring 1908. Later that year, the company came out with its first Modern Homes Catalog, showing 22 models of homes, ranging from $650 for a three-room cottage to $2,500 for a nine-room Queen-Anne style home.

Purchasing a home was fairly straightforward: customers chose a house from the catalog, placed an order and waited for the boxcars transporting the materials to arrive. Sears provided just about everything necessary, including lumber, shingles, roofing, millwork, flooring, plaster, lath, doors, windows, fixtures and the blueprints. The end-user provided the masonry, labor and a place to build within hauling range of a railroad.

Before Sears discontinued the program in 1940, it had sold 100,000 mail-order homes. "The big deal was the pre-cut lumber, given it was in the days before everyone had home power tools," said Rebecca Hunter, a mail-order homes buff and resident of Elgin, Ill., who was commissioned recently by a local historical foundation to research the number of area Sears' mail-order homes.

Given the labor intensity in hand-sawing lumber, the concept was appealing in that Sears supplied the exact amount of lumber needed. Of the more than 200 mail-order homes in Elgin, for example, 25 percent of the original owners were employed in the building trade, Hunter said. But, she added: "you could also hire labor. Just because you bought a kit didn't mean you had to do-it-yourself."

Houses made to order

Beyond selling home kits to individuals, Sears sold to local contractors and for a time formed a Construction Division to build homes as well. The main purpose was to afford an outlet for the sale of general merchandise and building materials.

The program hit its peak in the 1900s and early '20s, with Sears supplying not only the building supplies but also the cash to finance it. An overly generous mortgage lending policy helped lead to the program's demise, with Sears finding itself in the unpopular position of having to foreclose on thousands of delinquent mortgages during the Great Depression.

While Sears was the largest seller of mail-order homes, it was not the only, or even the first, to offer ready-cut kit houses. Montgomery Ward was in the mail-order home business, along with the Gordon-Van Tine Co., Davenport, Iowa, and Aladdin Readi-Cut Homes of Bay City, Mich., which started selling mail-order houses first, in 1906, and continued the longest, until 1983.