Washington DC - Sears Houses Over The Years

Two years ago, I wrote about the "The Great Sears Paper Trail", the idea that even though the original sales records from Sears Roebuck no longer exist, across the country, there is a trail of documents in the form of building permits, deeds, mortgages, newspaper articles and other recorded documents that allow us to find and authenticate Sears houses. Nowhere is the trail of document as robust or as accessible as in Washington DC. As I've shared in previous posts, online databases of mortgages and deeds, building permits as well as articles from digitized newspapers have allowed us to locate and/or authenticate hundreds of kit houses from Sears as well as other kit house manufacturers. This wealth of information has not only helped us to find Sears houses, it has assisted us in learning more about how the Sears Roebuck Modern Homes program operated in the Washington DC area. As we've assembled the data that is associated with these homes, it gives us the opportunity to share more about what we've learned.

McClure #3060 in Cheverly, Maryland

Image courtesy of the
Bentley Historical Library 

The McClure Company was a manufacturer of kit houses based in Saginaw, Michigan. While McClure only sold homes for a handful of years, I've been able to locate examples of McClure homes in several states. As I shared in a previous post, I learned of the McClure Company from research that had been done in Cheverly, Maryland. There are at least five examples of houses from McClure located in Cheverly. Today, I want to share one of the houses located in Cheverly, as it's a very nice example of the McClure #3060 model. To date, I'm not aware of any other examples of this model from McClure. But I'm hoping that by highlighting it, more examples of this house may come to light.

McClure #3063 in Ypsilanti Township, Michigan

Image courtesy of the
Bentley Historical Library 

If you have done any amount of research into kit houses, you're probably familiar with the big names in the kit house business - the three Chicago-based companies: Sears, Wardway (Montgomery Ward) and Harris Brothers and the three Bay City, Michigan companies: Aladdin, Lewis and Sterling and Davenport, Iowa based Gordon-Van Tine.  But there were a number of smaller, regional players in the kit house business too including companies like Bennett Homes out of North Tonawanda, New York and the McClure Company of Saginaw, Michigan. Most people have never heard of these smaller companies. But examples of homes from these companies can be found in communities across the country. While there's a fair amount of information about Bennett Homes available online, there's very little documented about the McClure company. To help fill that gap, I'm going to do a series of posts sharing examples of authenticated houses from McClure to help you identify examples in your hometown! Let's take a look!

Hyattsville, Maryland

I recently came across a nicely written article on the history of Sears homes by the Hyattsville Preservation Association of Hyattsville, Maryland. In that article it was noted that "Half a dozen or more of them [Sears houses] exist today in Hyattsville." Or more is right! I had a chance to see a lot of the Sears houses that still stand in Hyattsville while doing mortgage research in Prince George's County and have since supplemented that work with quite a bit of Google driving around the streets of Hyattsville and help from fellow kit house researchers. A number of the Sears houses that are located in Hyattsville have been previously documented. But I wasn't able to find a single source that listed all the houses in Hyattsville that are included on the national database of Sears houses. So I've put together a list of known Sears houses in Hyattsville for homeowners, residents and local groups like the Hyattsville Preservation Association to use for reference. Hyattsville, Maryland has some nice examples of Sears kit houses. Let's take a look!

Revisiting the History of the Final Years of Sears Roebuck's Modern Homes Program

If you've done any reading on the history of Sears Roebuck's Modern Homes program, one of the common "facts" that you'll encounter is that the Modern Homes program ended with the issuance of the last "Modern Homes" catalog in 1940. I read this version of events so many times in books by authors who knew far more than I did about the Modern Homes program that I simply accepted it as fact. At the time, those statements made sense to me. The absence of any catalogs after 1940 must have been a sign that Sears had closed up shop on the Modern Homes program, a victim of slow sales and the hangover of the financial losses incurred from defaulted mortgages during the Great Depression. But over time, as I continued to research the Modern Homes program and followed the research of my fellow kit house bloggers, I came to realize that this ending to the story simply wasn't right. The information from a wide range of contemporary sources told a very different story about the last years of the Modern Homes program.