One of my kit house projects for this winter is revisiting the mortgage records of Westchester County, New York. My focus the past couple of weeks has been the mortgages in the Town of Cortlandt and adjacent City of Peekskill. As I've been locating and identifying houses, I've found a few interesting examples of kit house models that we rarely see. I plan on sharing some of those houses over the next week or two. Let's check out today's example from Montrose, New York, the Wardway Winthrop!
Image courtesy of Archive.org |
A Sears Winthrop - Same name, different house! Image courtesy of Catarina Bannier |
Because Ward only started offering mortgages in 1927, fewer of their houses were financed this way as compared to houses from Sears. While there were dozens of Sears mortgages for the Town of Cortlandt and the City of Peekskill, there were only a handful of mortgages from Ward. Unlike many of the mortgages I located, I wasn't able to track down the amount of the mortgage for this house. That information should be available on the original mortgage record kept at Westchester County.
As the Winthrop from Ward's was only offered for one year, there's only a couple known examples of this model. Earlier this year, fellow kit house researcher Judith Chabot shared a Wardway Winthrop located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In that case, Judith was able to authenticate the house, which was built as a model house, through newspaper articles from the Pittsburgh Press.
Pittsburgh Press, June 14, 1931 Image courtesy of Judith Chabot |
4 Oak Rd - Montrose, New York - Wardway Winthrop Image courtesy of Google Streetview |
This house was listed for sale in 2015 and Zillow has some interior and exterior views of the house. For some reason, the listing started with this photo of the back of the house. Like the front of the house, the arrangement of the windows and door on the back of the house match the catalog image.
4 Oak Rd - Montrose, New York - Wardway Winthrop Image courtesy of Zillow |
4 Oak Rd - Montrose, New York - Wardway Winthrop Image courtesy of Zillow |
4 Oak Rd - Montrose, New York - Wardway Winthrop Image courtesy of Zillow |
Wardway likely didn't sell very many Winthrops in 1931. But my hope is that continued research into Wardway mortgages will turn up some additional examples. If you know of any, share that with us in the comments!
Great find! It's fun when we find these Wardway homes, especially when we can authenticate them. Good work!
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Sears-House-Seeker.blogspot.com
I'll second Judith's thoughts!
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