Thursday, December 12, 2019

Covington, Kentucky - An Introduction

Sears Langston
Covington, Kentucky
Covington, Kentucky is located on the south bank of the Ohio River, opposite the treasure trove of Sears houses that can be found in Cincinnati, Ohio. Once we discovered how many Sears houses were located in Cincinnati, it was only logical to assume that Covington would be home to a fair share of Sears houses too. Over the years, we had read stories that made reference to a large number of Sears houses in Covington. There were even rumors of a survey of Sears houses in Covington. But none of my fellow researchers had any luck putting their hands on said survey. From time to time, houses would pop up in real estate ads and searches of digitized newspapers, and we would add another Sears house in Covington to the list. But no one had pulled together a publicly available comprehensive list of Sears houses in Covington to see what all was out there - until now. Let's take a look!

Sears Ridgeland
Cincinnati Enquirer
The survey work in Covington actually dates back a couple years. Back in 2017, our group of kit house researchers spent some time looking for houses in Covington. I went back in 2018 to do a more comprehensive search of the city, making sure I checked as many streets as possible, even where I knew that houses had already been identified. I've personally been to Covington once but the 2018 survey was done using Google Maps and Bing Maps and some information from Zillow. While I probably missed a few areas of Covington, I believed I covered the vast majority of the city looking for houses. The end result of all that work is over 50 identified Sears houses. As I was pulling together the list this past week, I found an additional two houses! My fellow kit house researchers were responsible for quite a few of the additions to the list so special thanks to Cindy, Judith and Nigel for their contributions. Thank you all for your work!

To see what we've documented, check out the list of homes in Covington, Kentucky. As you can see, only the Ridgeland that was featured in a newspaper is authenticated. I bet many of the others could be documented through mortgage research. Also, as much as we looked around Covington, I have no doubt that there are more Sears houses to be found. If you know of any, please let us know!

August 2022 update: A number of houses were added to the list, taking the total over 60 houses. 
October 2023 update: A few more houses were added to the list. 

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