One Magnolia built in Lincoln, Nebraska, was demolished in 1985. Here are a few: Andrew just today noticed this brick house with the Sears curlicue decorative iron strapping (only offered by Sears, and the only style of iron strapping ever offered by Sears). HBM (. So Betcone gave us a huge clue as to what the top seller for Sears was. In other cases, the home followed the general design of a Sears house without being an exact duplicate. Researching Historic Kit and Plan Book Homes, We started looking around La Porte, Indiana, in 2015. Telephone 847-697-4551. www.kithouse.org. Washington D.C. and its nearby suburbs have an unusually rich cache of kit houses stashed away in some of the leafy, well-tended neighborhoods where 1920s houses still shine. Our national database of Sears houses in the U.S. has over 13,600 homes on it, and, after Ohio and Illinois, Pennsylvania is #3 in U.S. states with, at today's count, 1,963 Sears homes found. Here is a year-by-year list of houses as they were advertised in the Sears Modern Homes catalogs. Or did we just go wrong somewhere when someone decided the house you live in should be treated like a bank? Shipped by railroad boxcar, and then usually trucked to a home site, the average Sears Modern Home kit had about 25 tons of materials, with more than 30,000 parts. Additionally, at this point in the Sears Modern Homes program, the homes were sold/packaged only with standard-length wood, so none of the framing lumber would have been pre-cut (and, therefore, there would be no alpha-numeric stamps on the wood pieces in the house). New models were introduced every year, and some only stuck around for a couple years. Please browse through and enjoy the 1,000+ posts and 5,000+ photos! Melissa Steel of Patterson Heights in Beaver County said the story about the Sears house in McCandless sparked fond memories of the family next door who lived in one for many years. I just loved the look of it, she said. Open to the public. You'll notice that most are in states east of the Mississippi River, with highest overall state totals in Ohio, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and New York. Sears provided "capital and materials", on the condition that lots and foundations were already in place.