You Could Order an Entire House From the Sears Catalog

Between 1908 and 1942 a Sears, Roebuck and Co. customer in the United States could open the Modern Homes catalog, pick a house from designs ranging from a small bungalow to a four-bedroom Tudor, and order it. A railroad boxcar would arrive at the local station some weeks later carrying about 30,000 numbered pieces of pre-cut lumber, a bundle of plumbing, the doors, the windows, the lath, the lock sets, and a 75-page assembly manual.

The model was a logical extension of what Sears had been doing since 1888: leveraging a national rail network and a mail-order catalog to sell goods directly. Houses were just the largest item the catalog had ever shipped. Prices in the 1920s ranged from about $725 for the smallest design to $5,500 for the largest. Sears even financed many of them through its own mortgage department, which collapsed in the early 1930s as the Depression deepened and defaults mounted.

No central index of the houses was kept after the program closed, so the precise number built is debated. Sears archivists estimate between 70,000 and 75,000 dwellings. Catalog historian Rosemary Thornton, who has spent two decades documenting them, has personally identified more than 12,000 still standing. Many remain in working-class and railroad-adjacent neighbourhoods of the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic, where rail lines were dense.

Identifying a Sears home today is an art. The lumber is sometimes still stamped with model numbers. Distinctive built-in cabinetry, certain proprietary plumbing fixtures, and shipping-label fragments behind walls are clues. Owners occasionally find an envelope of unused screws or a nameplate behind plaster.

The program ended in 1942 as wartime materials rationing bit. Sears the catalog itself shut down half a century later.