Sears Homes of Lombard
/How many Sears Homes are in Lombard?
An example of this can be seen at 216 W. Maple Street.
Forty-three homes, more or less? That’s the estimated number of Sears Catalog homes left in Lombard according to researcher Lara Solonicke. She runs a popular blog and Facebook group, Sears Homes of Chicagoland, and has done research on these homes for about a decade. Lara and are former Archivist Jean Crockett worked together, looking at Sears homes in Lombard and Lara was our guest speaker at our 2021 Annual LHS Membership meeting and program.
Sears Roebuck; Sears, Roebuck and Co. c. 1920.
What is a Sears Catalog home?
It’s not a prefabricated building where a truck rolls up to a lot with a home that is already assembled. A lot owner would look through a Sears catalog, find a home design that was affordable and pleasing, order the design, and then receive the lumber and materials at a railroad siding. He or she would have to transport the materials to their lot and build the house according to the supplied blueprints. They could purchase hardware and interior finishings from the Sears Catalog separately. And Sears even offered mortgages for the prospective homeowners.
There were other home kits available. Montgomery Wards offered them, as Wardway houses, in their catalog and Lombard has a few remaining Wardway homes. Harris Brothers Company in Chicago listed catalog homes and a couple of those styles are still standing in town. There were six companies that offered catalog kit homes during the early 1900s up until the Great Depression. But, a word of warning. There were builders who would get their hands on a blueprint or drawing and would copy the plans for a homeowner. So there are homes out there that look like a Sears Catalog home but really are not a kit home.
So how do you verify your home as a Sears (or Wardway, etc)?
A bit of detective work and some determination is needed. You need to find out when your home was built. Going through the tax records will show when the home was built and you may even find that Sears held a mortgage on the property. The book, Houses by Mail, by Katherine Cole Stevenson and H. Ward Jandl is a comprehensive look at all the various styles of Sears Catalog homes.
Shipping label in the house 506 W Maple Street, shipped to Don Vandercook.
Matching your house style and floor plan is a good indication but the age of your home must also fall into the years the home was produced. You might find a shipping label in the home. Stamped lumber is complicated-just because you find a stamp on a joist or rafter doesn’t automatically mean it’s from Sears. The same holds true for finding that a built-in cabinet or door hardware came from Sears. Remember, the Sears Catalog was the Amazon store in its era.
Sears, Roebuck, and Company sold many things and interior fittings were just one of many items a homeowner could purchase. Contact Lombard Historical Society. Our historian, Margot Fruehe, worked with a Sears home researcher Dr. Rebecca Hunter in 2001. They first identified many of the catalog homes in Lombard and the archives hold a wealth of information about Lombard properties.
A few Sears Homes of Lombard
