HistoricOmaha

Omaha World Herald< Published April 22, 2007

CARLINVILLE, Ill. (AP) - Laurie Flori speaks with the fervor of a woman possessed. In the cadence of a Grange hall auctioneer, she ticks off each house on her street - all ordered from Sears, Roebuck and Co.

"That's a Carlin," she said, pointing. "That's a Whitehall. That's a Warrenton. That's a Lebanon."

Starting nearly a century ago, these stately names were bestowed upon a modest line of homes that could be purchased by mail.

To Flori, they are verses in a hymn to working-class America, to a time when things were built better and cost less, and when everything in the Sears catalog looked bigger and better than ordinary life.

For a while, the American dream was imprinted on those pages, as obtainable as a pair of work boots or dungarees.

A house of one's own, outhouse and plumbing extra - and a great deal of assembly required.

Flori's worship of these houses has been known to propel her right up the porch steps of people she's never met to proclaim they have history in their joists and it's their civic duty to preserve it.

Sometimes the folks at home are intrigued. Sometimes they have no idea what she's going on about and couldn't care less.

At all times, this stout, mile-a-minute talker is a woman obsessed: by houses that, during a 32-year span, could be ordered on credit. Houses that arrived with lumber cut and numbered for easy assembly, with 750 pounds of nails and paint for two coats.

She is not alone in her mission. Across the country, otherwise ordinary people have been transformed by obsession into identifying and preserving "kit houses" from Sears.

They traverse neighborhoods armed with flashlights and fervor, searching for a telling detail of a specific model: the gabled roof of the Warrenton, the dormer windows of the Medford.

They knock on strangers' doors, seeking admittance to the basements, searching for exposed beams with telltale Sears assembly numbers. They proselytize preservation with fervor.

Yet they are as similar and dissimilar as the 447 floor plans that Sears delivered.

"It's like King Tut and the Titanic," said Marilyn Raschka, who used to cover Beirut as a foreign correspondent and now lives in Hartford, Wis. "It's utterly fascinating."

"It's history," said Rebecca Hunter, a historian who lectures on preservation and lives in Elgin, Ill. "It's part of our heritage. And we have to do it ourselves because, apparently, Sears threw out everything."

Flori, true to her nature, is a little more blunt. "The only way I can explain it," she said, laughing, "is that it's like a cult."

All are fighting to identify and preserve whatever is left of the estimated 100,000 houses Sears sold. It isn't easy.

No one knows where all of them are because Sears, over the years, destroyed most of its sales records. So people such as Raschka and Hunter and Flori rely on their wits to seek out houses and authenticate them.

Other companies - Montgomery Ward, for example, and the Michigan-based Aladdin Co. - offered catalog homes. But because of name recognition, Sears got the most attention.

Carlinville is a special case. It encompasses nine blocks of nothing but Sears houses - the largest concentration in the country.

The homes constituted a $1 million order placed by Standard Oil of Indiana. The fuel giant purchased nearly 200 dwellings to house an influx of miners and managers in southern Illinois.

They called this new neighborhood the Standard Addition. They built a park and schools nearby. The city extended its limits for water and sewer lines.

Here were symbols of prosperity and security for a small town in southern Illinois, and the promise of better times ahead in brand-new homes.

The American dream arrived in scores of boxes crammed with doorknobs and oak doors pulled by steam engine across ribbons of railroad track.

Sears was selling the biggest consumer good of all.

The price was cheap, but the materials were not: cypress shingles, bronze door hinges, glazed windows, granite bathtubs. They came in styles and shapes and sizes befitting a wealthy farm owner. They also came in smaller sizes, at prices affordable to even an immigrant coal miner.

They carried evocative names such as the Montrose, a seven-room, one-bath Eastern colonial with green shutters, flower boxes and a hooded gable entrance. "Justly considered a beautiful home in any community, no matter how exclusive," said the catalog.

They were sold at prices ranging from $2,923 to $3,324. Sears estimated its prices were 30 percent to 40 percent lower than market rates.

Then there was Modern Home No. 55MP22, priced at about $400. It was a three-room cottage too small to qualify as even a shotgun shack. Sears boasted the house could be raised in eight hours, from floorboards to window shades, and offered photographic proof.

Blurred black-and-white catalog photos from the turn of the 20th century show four stages of assembly with a big clock in the foreground of each frame. At 9:30 a.m., three side walls are up, as are some interior partitions. At 4:30 p.m., the entire house is done, complete with a very modest front porch.

Sears offered its own mortgages. Over time, it would offer mortgages for land, as well, even though it was purchased separately. Regional lumber mills went up near transportation hubs to meet the demand.

But then came the Great Depression, and there went the houses-by-mail boom. Working-class Americans defaulted on their Sears mortgages. Families moved on to California, where it was said there were jobs picking crops.

So in 1940, Sears got out of the house-selling business.

And despite the adulation of people like Flori, the place of Sears homes in architectural history is decidedly modest, just like the houses.

Their blueprints were hybrids of what was popular at the time: Craftsman-style bungalows, Dutch colonials, mansard roofs. Sears was "marketing something to the broad population," said Paul Lusignan, spokesman for the National Register of Historic Places. "It was very common."

Flori and her husband, David, moved to Carlinville in the 1980s from a nearby town. David Flori had grown up in the Standard Addition, and he wanted to go home. They paid $18,000 for a Roseberry, with its wide front porch and an intersecting gable roof.

Little by little, the Floris redid the inside until the small house was restored.

Flori recalled how some tried to talk her out of moving to this side of town. "People told us not to buy in the Standard Addition. They said 'Oh, that's the slum area.'"

She wrinkled her nose.

"I set out to change that," she said. "A Sears home is something to be proud of."

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