10,000 Sears Houses!

Our virtual group of kit house researchers was popping virtual champagne bottles this week when it was announced that that 10,000th Sears house (a Sears Conway) had been added to the national database of Sears homes. As excited as we were about reaching this milestone, I have to admit that I'm still in a bit of shock at passing it. When I first mentioned the national database of homes two and a half years ago after the addition of the 3,000th house, I couldn't have imagined that we would reach the 10,000th home so quickly - or at all! It had taken 3 years to reach 3,000 homes. A big chunk of that total was thanks to the list of homes that Bea Lask had compiled in and around Cincinnati, Ohio. At the rate that we were adding homes at that time, if you had asked me, I probably would have guessed that it would take another 7 years to reach 10,000, and that assumes that we would even be able to find that many houses.

But here we are, just two and a half years later and we've cruised past the 10,000 house mark - 10,010  houses found as I type this - and we're on our way towards 11,000. Along the way, our group of researchers has found a lot of Vallonias and Crescents as well as a lot of rare and unique examples of Sears houses. We've learned a lot about how the Sears "Modern Homes" program actually worked and debunked some myths too.

None of this would have been possible without an incredible amount of hard work by a dedicated group of researchers located around the United States. By working together towards a common goal of documenting the existence of Sears houses in communities across the country, we've been able to accomplish something that some people doubted we could do - document the location of thousands of Sears houses located across the US (and a couple in Canada too!) Along the way, we've been assisted by a variety of people, some who have been researching kit houses going back decades. As we find houses, we have shared our discoveries on Facebook and through the blogs that several members maintain. Our efforts have been noticed by others with several of us being interviewed for newspaper articles and television segments. Although it wasn't a stated goal to bring more attention to the public-at-large, that's been one of the nice benefits of sharing what we've discovered with a public audience that's still interested in the kit house story.

I'll be doing some follow-up posts this week as I crunch the numbers from the database looking at the ever-popular "Where are the Sears Houses?" as well as some more information on the thousands of houses we've been able to authenticate. Watch for more details soon!