The Houses That Sears Built: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Sears Catalog Homes

This new edition includes more than 20 new photos of existing Sears Homes throughout the country as well as a plethora of recently discovered information.

This major revision also includes reproductions of newly-discovered original documents from the Sears Modern Homes Department as well as compelling interviews with men who worked at the Sears Mill in Cairo, IL. You'll also hear the fascinating stories from Sears Homeowners who actually built their own Sears Kit Home many decades ago!

Want to learn how to identify a Sears Home? This book contains new graphics, photos and easy-to-reference bulleted points that will tell you and show you - step by step - how to identify a Sears Home.

It also includes four brand new chapters, such as "Chapter 3 - The Amazing Mr. Sears; A Brief Look at The Handsome Genius and His Store," "Chapter 5 - Milling About Sears Homes, A Look Inside the Sears Mill at Cairo, Illinois," "Chapter 8 - Homart Homes, The 'Other' Sears Homes, "Chapter 11 - Those Dandy Houses, Testimonials; Trivia and Reminiscences of Building a Sears Modern Home."

Since the first edition of The Houses That Sears Built was published in Spring 2002, the author has appeared on CBS Sunday Morning News, PBS's History Detectives, A&E's Biography and WGN-TV News, as well as the New York Times, Christian Science Monitor, Dallas Morning News and more than 50 regional publications. As a result of this publicity, Ms. Thornton has received more than 1,000 emails and letters from readers all over the country, telling stories and sharing precious memories about their own "Sears Modern Homes," and she incorporated many of these stories into this new edition.

This new edition of The Houses That Sears Built is more than a revision - it contains a tremendous amount of new information and trivia and wonderful photos that the Sears Home enthusiast will treasure and enjoy!

About Sears Homes: Between 1908-1940, Sears customers ordered about 75,000 houses out of the Sears Roebuck and Company mail-order catalogs. The houses were shipped by rail to city lots and farms all over the country.

Each "kit home" contained 30,000 pieces, including 750 pounds of nails and 27 gallons of paint and varnish. A 75-page instruction book showed home buyers, step by step, how to assemble those 30,000 pieces of house.

Only 10% (approximately) of the Sears homes in the country have been discovered.

Because of this, our communities’ best architectural treasures – our grand collection of Sears homes – are being damaged by remuddling and worse, demolished.

There is tremendous interest in this topic and hopefully, The Houses That Sears Built will spur that interest even further.

When you have finished reading The Houses That Sears Built you will be your community’s expert on Sears homes. You’ll learn how to identify Sears homes from the inside, outside and from courthouse documents. You’ll learn the interesting details of Sears homes’ construction. One chapter is devoted to the $1 million order of Sears homes that was shipped to Carlinville, Schoper and Wood River (Illinois).

Another chapter is devoted to "The Lost Sears Homes." These are Sears homes which appeared only once in obscure Sears Modern Homes catalogs and were not included in "Houses by Mail: A Guide To Houses from Sears, Roebuck and Company," by Katherine Cole Stevenson and H. Ward Jandl.