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Ready Made Red Hook, Part 1
- 1. Catalogue Houses in the Early 20th Century Egbert Benson Historical Society of Red Hook Saturday, October 29th, 2011 An Illustrated Talk by Olivia Klose and Christopher Brazee
- 3. Prefabrication Hospital in Sydney, Australia (1787) Friends meeting house in Adelaide, Australia (1839) Prospectors, California (1849)
- 4. Pattern Books Delamater House, Rhinebeck (1844) Pattern Book
- 8. Why Mail-order? “ Machines do everything but think”
- 10. Choosing the Mail-order House
- 12. Who purchased Sears houses?
- 13. Building the Mail-order house
- 14. Still from One Week with Buster Keaton (1920)
Notes de l'éditeur
- Good afternoon, everyone, and thanks for coming out on what might be the first snowy day of the year, and thanks to the Egbert Benson Historical Society of Red Hook for inviting us here. My name is Olivia Klose and this is my colleague Chris Brazee, and we will be presenting on Ready-Made Red Hook and catalogue houses in the early 20th century. We know Red Hook’s bicentennial is fast approaching, but we wanted to take you back not 200 years to the founding of the Village, but rather 100 years to a period in which Red Hook, like much of America, was just beginning to experience the onset of suburbanization. An important influence on the architecture of this period was the mail-order kit homes sold through the catalogues of companies such as Sears Roebuck. Red Hook has a significant number of houses from this time, many of which may well have arrived in a tidy package on a box car. In investigating Red Hook’s early 20th century houses, we were lucky enough to stumble upon the story of a man named Frank Cooks, a builder who lived here in Red Hook and built dozens of houses more than 80 years ago, and that gave us a golden opportunity to show how the history of the mail-order house took place right here in Red Hook.
- What got us interested in mail-order houses was a bungalow we discovered on City Island, which is a small maritime community located in the Bronx. It is the first Sears House to be recognized by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission, which is an amazing fact considering how popular these houses were in their time. As soon as we began our research into Sears houses, we began seeing them everywhere... Including here in Red Hook, where just about every street seemed to have at least a few likely suspects... Houses that had that certain catalogue look to them like maybe you had seen it somewhere else before. But before we get to our tour of Red Hook’s catalogue houses, we’re going to give a little background about the origins of the mail-order house in America.
- The mail-order house can be traced as far back as the 17 th century, when prefabricated structures—including settlers’ cottages, hospitals, government buildings, churches, and other types of buildings—were transported globally across land and sea to serve the needs of colonial settlements. Typically composed of wood or iron panels bolted together on site, prefabricated structures could be erected or “knocked down” quickly and without specialized tools. During the 19 th century, the British Empire shipped prefabricated buildings to every continent on the globe. In America, prefabricated structures were used during the California Gold Rush of 1849, and later on they played an important role in settling the American West after the Civil War.
- Another important influence on the development of mail-order houses in America was the architectural pattern book of the mid-19th century. These books were meant for the prospective homeowner... And presented quaint illustrations and detailed descriptions of the moral and aesthetic virtues of the various house types and styles. The patterns ranged from a simple farmer’s cottage to the gentleman’s country villa. As a genre, the pattern book was shaped and promoted by two important figures in the history of architecture and also the Hudson Valley... namely landscape designer Andrew Jackson Downing and architect Alexander Jackson Davis. Davis’s Delamater House in Rhinebeck, built in 1844, is the quintessential pattern-book house.
- Towards the end of the 19 th century, the popular magazine played an even more important role than the pattern book in “educating” the American public about domestic architecture. These magazines featured many house plans “borrowed” from different pattern books or directly commissioned from architects, and marketed them to a nation of aspiring homeowners, targeting women in particular as the primary household consumer. Selling house plans through popular magazines was a trend that continued well into the 20 th century with publications such as House Beautiful, Good Housekeeping, and Ladies’ Home Journal, and it was this model that ultimately formed the basis for the mail-order house. The mail-order house took one giant step forward, however, by offering the house itself along with the plans.
- A true mail-order house is considered to be one in which the plans, the framing lumber, the millwork, and interior fixtures and finishes, are sold from a catalogue as a package, or KIT, and shipped by rail directly to the homebuyer for assembly on site. Often, but not always, the framing lumber was precut and fitted at the factory. Several companies began in the mail-order home business around the turn of the 20 th century, most of them located in the Midwest because of proximity to the lumber industry and railroads. The company credited with being first in the mail-order business was Aladdin, which started in 1906 out of Bay City, MI, and amazingly, sold its last catalogue home in 1980! Other companies active during the heyday of mail-order houses in the 1910s, 20s, and 30s, included the E.F. Hodgson Co. of Dover, MA.; the Ray H. Bennett Lumber Co. of North Tonawanda, NY; the Gordon-Van Tine Co. of Davenport, IA; the International Mill & Timber Co., and the Lewis Manufacturing Co./Liberty-Lewis Homes, all of Bay City, MI; and the Montgomery Ward and Harris Brothers companies of Chicago, IL.
- But undoubtedly the most famous mail-order home company was Sears, Roebuck and Company of Chicago. From its humble origins as a side business of Richard W. Sears, who began selling discount watches through the mail while working as a railroad station agent in Minnesota in the mid-1880s, Sears, Roebuck and Company quickly grew to become the nation’s most popular mail-order merchandiser, and later retailer, as well as America’s largest purveyor of mail-order homes in the period between World War I and World War II. Sears sold everything from farm equipment to fishing tackle, and by 1908, when the company launched its mail-order home business under the Modern Homes name, a Sears catalogue was practically a staple in every American home. By 1940, when the Sears Modern Homes division was formally discontinued, the company had sold upwards of 50,000 mail-order houses in over 400 different models, and a “Sears house” had become virtually synonymous with a mail-order house.
- To answer the question of why Sears and other companies ventured into the mail-order homes business, historians generally cite some very broad historical trends, including developments in building technology, the increasing efficiency and broadening reach of rail transport, and a rising demand for affordable, modern homes among America’s fast-urbanizing population. But the story of the birth of Sears’s Modern Homes department is actually is pretty simple, starting with the fact that the company had sold building materials through its catalogue since 1896. The story continues in 1906, when the head of Sears’s china department, a man named Frank Kushel, was told to close the building materials department because of lackluster sales. Kushel instead convinced the company to transform the department into a vehicle for marketing houses kits directly to the homebuyer. Kushel is credited with recognizing the cost savings—both for Sears and for the customer—that could be achieved by volume purchasing of building materials, factory-cutting of lumber and millwork, and direct shipment from the mill or factory to the customer. This was a remarkable innovation, and represented really the first instance of mass production applied to the traditional building industry in America. Most Sears catalogues prominently featured illustrations of the company’s sprawling factories, lumber yards, and millwork plants, as a way to inspire confidence in the quality of their product and the efficiency of their business. A Sears house catalogue from 1914, titled Ready Made Buildings, even announced that Sears’s “Machines do everything but think”.
- The Sears catalogue was the primary means of selling the mail-order house to the customer, although Sears did set up sales offices in various cities and advertised home visits by personal sales representatives. The typical catalogue featured an array of house models, each illustrated with an appealing depiction of the house set within a suburban landscape. Each model was also illustrated with the all-important floor plan, which showed how convenient and cozy the layout of the house was, and a list of the features included in the house kit, such as built-in bookcases, kitchen inglenooks, or sleeping porches. Sears added the ingenious flourish of naming the house models rather than simply numbering them for identification, which gave the house model personality, status, and sometimes grandiose associations. Some of our favorite Sears house model names, which are none too subtle, are the Martha Washington, the Jefferson, the Magnolia, the Hollywood, and, best of all, the Olivia. The final and most important selling point was the low advertised price for the house kit, which, in 1908 ranged from the least expensive model (at $650) to the most expensive model (at $2,500).
- Because Sears wanted to appeal to as wide an audience as possible with their Modern Homes, they offered house models in traditional, tried-and-true architectural styles such as Queen Anne, Colonial Revival, Dutch Colonial Revival, Tudor Revival, Spanish Mission or Mediterranean, and Craftsman. In its 32-years of selling houses, Sears offered only three models designed in avant-garde architectural styles, namely Prairie and Modern, which are the three houses seen at the bottom of the slide. Sears Modern Homes customers were encouraged to customize their home, and the catalogues advertised that floor plans could be flipped, different finishes or materials chosen, and porches and dormers added or removed, etc. Customization was an important selling point for the homebuyer because it helped disguise the factory-made origins of the mail-order house.
- It wasn’t unusual for the various mail-order house companies to present very similar, if not identical, house models, and this was because companies would sell whatever they knew to be popular with the customer, and would often crib house designs from each other or directly from the architectural press, introducing just enough variation to call it their own. A good example of can be seen here with the Sears “Cambridge” model, on the left, and the Montgomery Ward “Maywood” model, on the right, both from 1931.
- Sears houses have typically been associated with America’s suburban middle class, but actually Sears and other catalogue homes were purchased by a wide range of customers from working-class city dwellers to major industrial corporations like Standard Oil, which ordered 192 Sears houses for its workers in Carlinville, Ohio in 1919. The image on the upper left shows Standard Oil’s Sears houses under construction. Sears houses were particularly well suited for the farmer, who often already owned the land they would build on, and who might have construction experience. The popular image of the American farm, at least the midwestern farms that aren’t as old as those in Red Hook, is at least in part a product of the Sears catalogue. For city and suburban dwellers, Sears had sales offices where sales representatives could personally assist homebuyers in selecting and ordering a house- there were even 2-foot scale models of Sears houses on display. Between 1911 and 1933, Sears also offered generous mortgage plans, making homeownership an even more attainable goal for many Americans.
- So, how was a Sears mail-order house put together? Virtually all Sears catalogue houses after 1918 were shipped by rail from a factory and arrived on site (probably by truck) to be assembled by the owner or a hired builder or contractor. The most important part of kit was the construction manual, which ran to 75 pages or more, and the blueprints keyed to each piece of stamped lumber. Masonry was not included in the kit, and plumbing and electrical systems were not included either but were offered as “extras” in the Sears catalogue. Even considering the “hidden costs” that were not included in the advertised price, such as those just mentioned and also the cost of land to build on and hired labor, Sears promoted the idea that their mail-order houses were a cheaper alternative. A Sears mail-order house promised to save the customer money because the services of an architect were no longer needed and because the house could be erected in a fraction of the time it would take to build a traditional house.
- The expectation was that someone with basic tools and limited experience with construction could put up a Sears house... provided that they follow the manual and blueprints. Sears warned against modifying the plans or switching out any piece of material, no matter how small. As you can see in this movie still from a 1920 Buster Keaton film, One Week, this might be the disastrous result! T his film showed a young couple’s ill-fated attempts to put together a kit house... just one among many social commentaries on the idea of a home-in-a-box; to say nothing of the architecture profession’s opinions on the subject.