Back in the day, Ladies Home Journal magazine really was about women and housing. Today, it’s more about high-fat cake recipes and low-fat diets, but that’s another story…

In the first decade of the new century, Ladies’ Home Journal consistently featured a majority of articles centered on homeownership. The February 1911 issue was devoted to the new housing style:  Bungalows. One headline said,  “The Bungalow, because of its easy housekeeping possibilities is becoming more popular every year and bungalows show what can be done with a little money wisely spent.” The same issue featured these articles:

When you build a little house (common mistakes to avoid)

How I built this house for $700

The Bungalow - from $250 - $2500

What I did with an old farmhouse

Two houses built for less than $1500

What can be done with old houses

A fireproof house for less than $4000

If a woman must earn her living at home (A house planned by a woman to meet this need.)

It seems as though that the ladies were ahead of the men on this bungalow thing. Whilst Ladies Home Journal was promoting bungalows, American Carpenter and Builder described them as “tiresome.”

Craftsman houses and odd bungalows will have their day. People may like them now, but it is an extreme type and will become tiresome in course of time. The uncompromising squareness in the craftsman style, with its small wall space does not permit of much artistic decoration (June 1913).

Within the pages of the 1920s LHJ, I was delighted to discover this advertisement for a catalog of mail-order kit homes. The next picture below features a real, live GVT #633 in Roanoke, Virginia.

Advertisement in LHJ for Gordon Van Tine/Wardway Homes

Wardway Home in Roanoke, VA

Dr. Joseph Lister - a 19th Century physician - is largely responsible for the bungalow craze, but that’s one tidbit that I’ve never seen in my books on architectural history. The fact is, Joseph Lister and his germ theory dramatically changed the way Americans thought about their homes.

For so many years, mothers could only watch in helpless horror as their young children died from any one of a myriad of “common” diseases. And then in the late 1800s, Dr. Joseph Lister discovered that germs were culprit. Mothers and fathers, weary of burying their infants, had a new arch enemy: household dirt. As is explained in the 1908 book, Household Discoveries and Mrs. Curtis’ Cook-Book:

Not many years ago disease was most often deemed the act of Providence as a chastening or visitation for moral evil. Many diseases are now known to be merely human ignorance and uncleanliness. The sins for which humanity suffers are violations of the laws of sanitation and hygiene, or simply the one great law of absolute sanitary cleanliness… Every symptom of preventable disease and communicable disease…should suggest the question: “Is the cause of this illness an unsanitary condition within my control?”

Now that the enemy had been identified, modern women attacked it with every tool in their arsenal. Keeping a house clean was far more than a matter of mere pride: The well-being, nay, the very life of one’s child might depend upon a home’s cleanliness. What mother wanted to sit at the bedside of their sick child, tenderly wiping his fevered brow and pondering the awful question: “Was the cause of this illness an unsanitary condition within my control?”

Because of Dr. Lister and his germ theory, the ostentatious, dust-bunny-collecting Queen Anne, with its ornate woodwork, fretwork and gingerbread fell from favor with a resounding thud.

Simplicity, harmony and durability are the keynotes of the modern tendency. The general intention seems to be to avoid everything that is superfluous; everything that has a tendency to catch and hold dust or dirt. Wooden bedsteads are being replaced by iron or brass; stuffed and upholstered furniture by articles of plain wood and leather. Bric-a-brac, flounces, valances and all other superfluous articles are much less fashionable (from Household Discoveries and Mrs. Curtis’ Cook-Book).

Remember the movie “It’s A Wonderful Life”?  There’s a 1920s scene where George Baily and his girlfriend pause in front of the massive Second Empire house. It sits abandoned and empty, deteriorating day by day.  This was not an uncommon fate for Victorian manses in post-germ theory America. Who knew what germs lay in wait within its hard-to-clean walls?

The February 1911 Ladies’ Home Journal was devoted to the new housing style: Bungalows. One headline said, “The Bungalow, because of its easy housekeeping possibilities is becoming more popular every year.

And all because of Dr. Lister.

(By the way, Dr. Lister did not invent the popular mouthwash but it was named after him and his discoveries.)

From 1908-1940, Sears sold houses by mail order. These 30,000-piece kits came with a 75-page instruction book that told the wanna-be homeowner how to put it all together. Sears promised that a “man of average abilities” could have it 100% complete in 90 days. Sears offered 370 designs, including foursquares, cape cods, neo-tudors, trailing edge Victorians, Colonials and more.

The specialty catalogs  - devoted to “Modern Homes” - averaged about 100 pages with the peak being 1924, when the catalog hit 140 pages, with 100 designs.  These “Sears Modern Homes” catalogs can now be found on eBay for a variety of prices.

And these really were modern homes. Think about this. Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote her “Little House” books describing life on the plains in the 1870s and 1880s. She talked about living in a soddie - a house made with dirt blocks - and waking up to find frost on her comforter.

At the turn of the 20th Century, American architecture evolved very quickly. We went from living in tiny cabins and soddies (sans lights, central heat and indoor plumbing) to these sweet little bungalows with three bedrooms, a full bathroom, and a kitchen - wired for electricity!

Sears Osborne, catalog image from 1924

In fact, sometimes these mail-order homes were more modern than the communities in which they were sold.

And that’s why the plumbing and electrical fixtures were NOT part of the kit home, but were purchased separately. If electrical service and municipal water systems were not available in your community, you wouldn’t need to spend money on the plumbing and electrical supplies!

In the back pages of the Sears Modern Homes catalogs, this little jewel was offered:

And it has two seats - for more family fun in the outhouse!!

The Sears Modern Homes department closed their doors in 1940. During a corporate house-cleaning after WW2, all sales records, blueprints, ephemera and other items were destroyed. The only way to find these 75,000 kit homes today is literally, one by one.

To learn more, buy Rose’s book, The Houses That Sears Built.

continued from part I

My new husband and I arrived in Peoria the day before the surgery and spent some time with both girls. I needed to meet this Kaycee person. Despite my best “thy will be done” prayers, I still felt resentful toward Kaycee. I asked God again and again to open my heart and let Kaycee in..

Kaycee was a soft-spoken, sweet girl with freckles, fair skin and red hair. The moment I laid eyes on her, I felt an outpouring of maternal love that could only have its source in the divine. Crystal took me aside and said, “A few weeks ago, Kaycee told me she couldn’t go through with this. She said that it was better for her to pass on than to take a kidney from her best friend. I told her that I wanted to do this.”

Crystal also told me a little about Kaycee’s background. She received her first transplant when she was two years old. That kidney (from her mother), had lasted almost 20 years. Since then, she’d been on massive amounts of drugs and had already endured countless hospitalizations and surgeries. A few years earlier, Kaycee’s father, who’d been a touchstone throughout her difficult childhood, had died suddenly. And now Kaycee was in dialysis three times a week, three hours per treatment. It was after Crystal accompanied Kaycee to dialysis that she realized this was no way for a young woman to live. In additional to the physical and emotional strain, there was a financial strain, too. Twenty-four-year-old Kaycee was more than $100,000 in debt, due to the incredibly expensive dialysis treatment.

At one point during the five-hour surgery, Kaycee’s strong and stalwart mother stepped into a corner of the waiting room and sobbed uncontrollably. I felt a wave of compassion for this woman. How blessed I’d been to have had three healthy girls. How short-sighted and small-minded I’d been to rail against this procedure.

Continued at Kidney-shaped Hearts, Part III

Kasee (left) and Crystal (right)