Home Deliveries

Mail-order kit houses built an affordable modern living trend

We call it the “Dream House” and believe it the goal for real home lovers to try and achieve. -The Book of Modern Homes, Sears, Roebuck & Co., 1940

by CHARLOTTE BARRETT Community Preservation Manager, Western New England

In the first half of the twentieth century kit house companies offered a path to attaining the dream of prosperity and social mobility through homeownership. These companies sold precut kits of house parts, ordered by catalogue, which were shipped by rail and then trucked to the construction sites. There, a local builder or the owner assembled the house, using the instructions provided. The kits included millwork, lumber, lath, roof shingles, flooring, hardware, paint, and more. Customers could tailor architectural details as well as order appliances and light fixtures.

Kit houses—also called precut, ready-cut, catalogue, or mailorder houses—are part of the history of residential architecture and suburban development. They lie along a historical continuum that began with pattern books in the early nineteenth century and continues today with modular housing. Their affordability made them an important chapter in the story of worker housing, much as three-deckers served this role in more densely populated cities.

The Midwest was headquarters to many of the best-known kit house manufacturers: Aladdin Readi-Cut Homes, Liberty Homes, and Sterling Homes in Bay City, Michigan; Gordon-Van Tine Homes in Davenport, Iowa; and Sears Modern Homes, Harris Homes, and Wardway Homes (Montgomery Ward) in Chicago. While Aladdin is credited with launching the kit house craze in 1906, other companies quickly followed. Perhaps best known are the kit houses of Sears,

Roebuck & Co. Its thick catalogues, selling everything from household items and clothing to farm equipment and building materials, were already a familiar and trusted resource for many Americans.

Kit house companies marketed their structures as modern and affordable, with the latest in technological advances to facilitate the efficient running of a home. Some offered financing with favorable rates to attract customers who earned enough to own rather than rent. The companies produced annual catalogues with a dizzying array of house models reflecting popular styles of the time, from modest bungalows and Capes to grand Colonial Revivals and Queen Anne Victorians.

These catalogues appealed to idealized notions of domestic life with florid language and renderings of houses in picturesque settings reminiscent of those in Andrew Jackson Downing’s mid-nineteenthcentury books on cottage residences and country homes. Many had exotic names, evoking romantic images of a life of financial security and leisure. There was the tenroom “Magnolia,” the most costly model in the 1919 Sears Modern Homes catalogue at $5,140, and “The Villa,” an Aladdin Readi-Cut home that sold for $3,420 in 1916. Less expensive models like Aladdin’s four-room “The Ruby,” sold for as little as $400 in 1916. Other models had place names, like Aladdin’s “The Virginia,” and the Sears “Lucerne,” for customers who fantasized about living in another region of the country, or the world.

Burlington, Vermont, which boasts a notable concentration of kit houses, offers a fascinating case study of the socioeconomic changes that fueled the popularity of this building type across the country. Burlington’s location at the junction of two railroad lines, the subdivision of large estates and farms for housing, and the extension of the streetcar to city limits combined to create the ideal environment for this housing trend. In the late 1800s, a lumber- and textilesbased industrial economy yielded to service and professional sectors that supported a growing middle class. Families that had once rented in the dense city center acquired the financial means to purchase a home in a suburban environment, where they could be closer to nature and still enjoy an easy commute to work by automobile or public transportation. Census records reveal that sales clerks, teachers, accountants, business owners, gardeners, construction managers, and lawyers, among others, owned kit houses in the city.

Burlington’s kit houses, many

Aladdin Readi-Cut Houses issued this sales catalogue in 1929. Featured on the cover is “The Glendale,” which was available in four sizes ranging from $920 to $1,168. PAGE 15 With the most magnificent residence it offered, “The Magnolia,” Sears, Roebuck & Co. boasted that this Colonial’s “imposing appearance, graceful lines and other attractive features” resembled the Cambridge, Massachusetts, home of nineteenth-century poet Henry W. Longfellow.

with a one-car garage or auto shed, are concentrated in some neighborhoods and scattered through others. Houses produced by companies including Sears, Roebuck & Co., Aladdin, Montgomery Ward, and Gordon-Van Tine are represented in its housing stock. The Five Sisters neighborhood in the south end of the city contains one of the most intact collections of kit houses. Developed from the subdivision of two large estates in the early 1900s, it is one of the most popular neighborhoods in the city. This forty-acre neighborhood enjoys a strong sense of community, encouraged by its modest-size homes on small lots and cohesive visual identity.

The Great Depression dealt a blow to the kit house business, and with the demand for quickly assembled and economical housing after World War II, the newer building technology of prefabricated housing took hold. Human ingenuity continues to address the need for affordable, easily assembled, and sustainable housing. Modular houses, tiny houses, and shipping container houses are the next generation of kit houses, responding with designs from the simple to the extravagant to meet the financial means and tastes of a diverse America.

Last year, Historic New England launched a kit house initiative in Burlington as a focus area within a larger effort to work with partners around the region on preservation projects that reflect diverse stories and include a wide representation of geographic areas, architectural styles, time periods, and building types. As twentieth-century kit house marketers wisely ascertained and used to their advantage, owning a home was central to the notion of the so-called American Dream. Today, the modest size of kit houses, and their small lots, make them particularly vulnerable to insensitive additions and alterations or demolition to make way for larger houses.

You can learn more about kit houses at our virtual program Bungalow in a Box: Kit Houses of the Early Twentieth Century on November 3 at 5 PM. Register online at my.historicnewengland. org/11338/kit-house.

Historic New England is working with homeowners, local organizations, and state and local government to share the story of this important and overlooked building type and to explore ways to ensure its preservation. For more information contact Charlotte Barrett at cbarrett@ HistoricNewEngland.org or 802989-4723.