Wardway Avalon in Pontiac, Michigan

My recent posts about a neighborhood of Wardway homes reminded me that I had come across one of these homes prior to discovering the larger neighborhood of homes. This Wardway Avalon is located at 740 Joslyn. Unfortunately, the reason I discovered this house was its inclusion on a list of homes that were up for auction after being foreclosed on for failure to pay property taxes. For a foreclosure house, it doesn't look to be in bad shape from the outside and still has some of the original features of the Avalon model. Let's hope that it has a new owner who will take good care of it.

740 Joslyn - Pontiac, Michigan - Wardway Avalon

Image courtesy of Oakland County Treasurer's Office

Sears Ashmore in Highland Park, Michigan

Updated! See the link at the end of the post for more details.

One of the enjoyable aspects of being a kit house hunter is the chance to collaborate with fellow kit house enthusiasts. Today, one of the newer members of our group of kit house researchers shared a house he had found in the Medbury's-Grove Lawn Subdivisions Historic District in Highland Park, Michigan. While we were discussing that house and its neighbor, one of the other members, Cindy Catanzaro, who manages the Sears Modern Homes page on Facebook, spotted what looked like a rare Sears model - the Ashmore.

180 Moss - Highland Park, Michigan
Image courtesy of Google Maps

A Neighborhood of Wardway Homes - Part 3

After discovering a neighborhood of possible Wardway homes in Pontiac, Michigan, we learned that the subdivision where the homes were built was platted by the Modern Housing Corporation. But this wasn't the first or only subdivision platted by that company. A few months after the company platted the Modern Housing Corporation Oakland Park Subdivision in March 1927, the company platted their Modern Housing Corporation Oakland Park No. 1 Subdivision in July 1927.

Image of Wardway Homes Catalog
Image courtesy of Antique Home

Sears Vallonia in Northville, Michigan

The city of Northville, Michigan is only a couple of miles south of where we live in Novi. Best known for its historic downtown and Victorian Festival each year, Northville is also home to at least nine kit houses from Aladdin, Lewis and Sears. The City of Northville is split almost equally between Wayne and Oakland Counties and Baseline is the dividing line between the two counties. The most often recognized of these kit homes - a Sears Vallonia - can be found at 317 Baseline.

317 Baseline - Northville, Michigan - Sears Vallonia

Identifying my first Sears house

When Wendy and I were getting started finding kit homes, we made several trips to Ann Arbor to look for and photograph Sears houses. Our guide was the list of kit homes that Grace Shackman and Rob Schweitzer has assembled back in March 1991. But as we drove the streets of Ann Arbor, it seemed like every other house was a kit house - at least to our then untrained eyes.  

As we worked our way across the city, we eventually reached a neighborhood on the far west side of Ann Arbor that didn't include any kit houses from the list. We almost skipped it. But the neighborhood consisted of only a couple of short streets and we decided to give it a look. As we turned into the neighborhood, we discovered that the streets weren't even paved. Dirt roads in Ann Arbor? Who knew! I wasn't sure if that was a good sign or not but as we drove the short couple of blocks, each street ending in a dead-end, we saw only a couple of houses that could have be "maybes". But we didn't see anything we recognized. 

As we reached the last dead-end of the last street in this small subdivision, we spotted this house at 3417 Ferry. 

3417 Ferry - Ann Arbor, Michigan