Inside the mind of a Sears House hunter

In her free time, Judith Chabot, a recently retired high school teacher, hunts for a particular kind of house. She browses Zillow listings, pores over historical mortgage records and scours neighborhoods on Google Street View.

“I work with a group of about eight or 10 other people who just look for Sears Houses around the United States,” she said. “We’ve got over 18,000 houses on our list.” 

In the early 20th century, Sears, Roebuck and Co., the famed American retailer, sold mail-order houses. More precisely, the company sold kits with lumber, staircases, faucets, window screens and other building materials via a catalog called Sears Modern Homes from 1908 to 1942.  

“1908 was when they started packaging everything together,” Chabot said. Later, the company’s packages included precut lumber. “Sears touted that a man of reasonable ability could put the house together himself,” she said. 

In reality, many buyers hired builders to construct the houses they ordered from Sears, but the cost savings of precut lumber and packaged materials were substantial.

“Mostly, these were marketed, especially once it was a precut system, going to just the average homeowner who couldn’t afford to hire their own architect to design a home,” said Chabot. “I think they were just looking at Mr. and Mrs. Joe America.”

Sears also offered financing options — mortgages — for customers purchasing homes through its catalogs. “In fact, that’s one of the ways that we have found a lot of the Sears houses, through looking at historic mortgage records,” Chabot said. 

Researchers have pointed out that Sears catalogs helped Black Americans living in the South avoid the racist restrictions and humiliations of Jim Crow-era shopping. It’s also possible that Sears mortgages were easier for Black people to obtain than other financing options of the era.

“Sears didn’t ask a lot of questions on their mortgage research paperwork,” Chabot said. 

Though Sears sold an estimated 75,000 homes in the United States between 1908 and 1942, it did not keep an official list. Now, researchers and hobbyists like Chabot are working to build a national database authenticating buildings that people claim are Sears Houses and discovering as many as they can find.

“It’s just really fun looking for them. It’s kind of like bird-watching,” Chabot said. “There’s some kind of thing that we all feel when we can connect to the people who were around before us.”

Use the audio player above to hear more about Sears Houses. 

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