Downers Grove's Sears Homes

Downers Grove, IL, (DG) claims to be the Sears catalog home capital of the world. (Roadside)  Some 300 were assembled, and many still exist. And at least 40 of the possible 450 models of homes are represented. The number of 27 in the Wikipedia is wrong. That is the number that is included on the trolley tours that are held four times a year.

Sears started selling "house kits" in 1908 and called them "Modern Homes." And "modern" was not just hype.  They had central heating, indoor plumbing, electricity (Wikipedia), and drywall instead of lath and plaster. (Examiner) 70,000 were sold before too many defaults on mortgages during the depression caused Sears the exit the home business in 1940. Sears Homes has examples of some of the home catalog entries that Sears offered.

The homes were affordable, attractive and saved the buyer 40 percent of the cost of labor because of precut milling, he said. There were no power tools then, and with the kit homes, local carpenters would not have to measure and hand cut each piece of wood. (ChicagoTribune)

DG had excellent team tracks so it was relatively easy for the carpenters to unload the 1-3 boxcars shipped for a house. Each boxcar contained about 30,000 numbered pieces. It was still a challenge to transport the material with horse and wagon, which is why most of the houses are built within 4 blocks of the team tracks.

DG is a nice place to live. So some people are buying older, smaller houses so that they can tear them down and build a new, big house on the lot. That is, an old house is "scrapped." I hope that realtors are being careful not to sell Sears homes to people who intend to scrape the house. Downers is making an effort to preserve its Sears homes and to survey its architectural heritage.

Update:

Carl Venzke posted
Mr. Davison's house arrived at the train station in a boxcar containing about 12,000 pieces. Loaded with much care and forethought, these massive boxcars were packed to the ceiling with building materials. Most likely, the building materials were shipped from a massive Sears mill in Cairo, Illinois.

Carl Venzke posted
Excerpt from an Aladdin Company brochure demonstrating how a kit house could be shipped from their Bay City headquarters in a single railway box car (1952).

Screenshot at -1:48 (source)