WHEN HOUSES CAME ON TRAINS

THE KIT HOMES THAT SHAPED AMERICA'S SUBURBS

WORDS BY ZACH KYLE

PHOTO BY KAREN DAY

Boise remains the most remote major metropolitan area in the lower 48, but the young city felt even more like a speck in a sea of sagebrush in the early 1900s.

Highway construction that made automobile travel common in the region didn’t transpire until after World War II. The sheer distance between Boise and the tastemaking cities toward either coast was frustrating for a small city wanting to keep up with the fashions of the day.

So it must have seemed like magic for Boiseans who picked up a Sears, Roebuck and Co. catalogue, ordered a house and had it delivered via rail. The home shipped as a kit that the new homeowner either assembled themselves or hired a general contractor to build for them.

And not just any house, said Tully Gerlach, Boise historian and librarian at Boise Public Library. Boiseans were starting to see Victorian homes as passe’. The kit homes sold by Sears were stylish.

“(Kit homes) now seem quaint, but there was nothing quaint about them at all,” Gerlach said. “They were very modern, very forward.”

Sears is the best known of several companies that sold kit homes. The retail giant sold and shipped around 100,000 kit homes from 1908 to 1940, according to “Houses by Mail,” a 345-page book on the subject. The houses ranged from small to extravagant, but their prices were relatively affordable. For example, the two-bed, one-bath Estes model sold for as little as $617 in 1928, or about $9,200 in today’s currency.

The huge, Colonial-style Glen View, which had two stories and four bedrooms, two porches and a garage, sold for $3,718 in 1937, or about $65,250 today.

Several local historians have tried to figure out how many kit homes remain standing in the Treasure Valley, including Dan Everhart, outreach coordinator for the Idaho State Historical Society. He knows of two kit buildings in the area, and Rose Thornton, an amateur expert on the topic, identified several more on a road trip through southwest Idaho.

But there’s obviously more kit homes around. A quick flip through “Houses by Mail” reveals tons of images of plenty of houses that look strikingly similar to many houses around Boise—the North End in particular. Gerlach suspects his North End home came from a kit, though he doesn’t have the documentation to prove it. Everhart guesses there’s dozens of kit homes around Boise, and more in the region.

So kit homes remain a bit of a white whale for historians trying to piece together how they fit into Idaho life in the early 20th Century. For Everhart, kit homes speak to Boise’s reliance on the railroad as a lifeline to big-city culture, and to the chip on Boiseans’ shoulder to establish their city as a place of consequence.

“Everyone had access to a Sears catalogue,” he said. “They were like the internet. They were sort of a unifying force. While Idaho architecture was always playing catch-up, the kit homes let people be completely current with their peers across the country.”

Without official documentation, historians don't know exactly how many kit homes reside in the Treasure Valley. That number, at least in Boise, is estimated at 'dozens', with more around the state.