♪♪ Michael Morain: These days we are so used to ordering everything we could ever want online with a few clicks of a button.
But not so long ago, people browsed actual catalogs made from real paper for all kinds of things, toys and kitchen gadgets and clothes.
Of course, the Sears catalog is the most famous catalog of all.
But it offered so much more.
In the Sears catalog, you could even browse through and order through the mail a home.
♪♪ Michael Morain: Sears no longer prints catalogs, and not surprisingly they no longer manufacture houses.
But, from 1908 to 1940, they sold about 75,000 mail order houses.
There were more than 350 styles of homes.
The homes ranged from $360 to about $3,000, which in today's terms is about $10,000 up to $80,000.
So they were marketing these homes really to middle class Americans.
♪♪ Michael Morain: When customers ordered their houses through the mail, the shipment would come usually on the rail.
So a boxcar would arrive with an average of 30,000 parts and 25 tons on average.
So, it was up to the customer to figure out how to get it from the train station to the plot of land where they wanted to actually build the house.
Michael Morain: 100 years ago when these houses were really popular you couldn't just go and watch a how-to video on YouTube, you had to figure out -- you either had to find an expert who knew how to do it, a local carpenter or somebody really handy or you had to follow along the instructions printed step-by-step for 75 pages to make sure that you're building your house right.
♪♪ Michael Morain: It's hard to pinpoint exactly how many are in Iowa because they are often hard to recognize unless you're inside the house.
So we don't know, but it's likely that there are hundreds including in Corning and Solon, Fort Madison.
I know there's one in Bussey too.
♪♪ Michael Morain: These DIY kit homes, the styles ranged pretty significantly.
So they're hard to immediately identify.
But you can do it if you're inside.
Sometimes the rafters or sheet rock or plumbing elements were stamped with SR for Sears Roebuck.
I know some of the bathtubs there is a little SR in one of the lower corners of the bathtub farthest from the faucet.
So, if you know the owners well enough to snoop around their bathtub you can identify it that way.
♪♪ ♪♪ Michael Morain: I think it's important to remember that the mail order homes, from Sears at least, started in 1908, which was the same year that the Model T first rolled off the conveyor belt at Ford.
So, a lot of Americans were purchasing cars.
Cars were a new thing.
And that allowed families to move a little bit out of the city's center, so suburbs started developing.
So people had space to build their own home and a lot of building materials were first being invented and developed and engineered around the same time.
Sheet rock was a big development because people could just install that rather than hiring a plaster expert.
So there were lots of ways that things became more automated and more mass produced and Americans figured that out really in lots of different ways, both marketers and consumers.
♪♪ Michael Morain: Mail order homes continued through 1940 through Sears and then with World War II building supplies were in short supply.
There was all of the materials were going to the war effort.
And then after the war when soldiers returned, to start the baby boom really, suburbs began developing in a different way where developers and construction companies built big tracts of land rather than relying on the individual families to build their own home.
♪♪ Michael Morain: I think today when so much is accessible with a couple of clicks on our iPhone and Amazon delivers whatever you want, toothpaste or cat food or whatever, the idea that your grandparents ordered 30,000 spare parts over the rail lines and built a house that your family may still own, these are very tangible brick and mortar souvenirs of an interesting, innovative time in American history.
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