After years of hard work, Dale Patrick Wolicki and I are finishing up our book on Wardway Homes. Yes, Montgomery Ward sold kit homes through mail order, and heretofore, there’s been a dearth of information on this topic.

The story of Wardway Homes is quite intriguing but digging up the documents and the details on this topic has been challenging. For many years, Dale has been collecting catalogs, clippings, magazine articles and ephemera on Wardway Homes and without him, this book never would have been written.

Look for “The Mail-order Homes of Montgomery Ward” to appear sometime in late June or early July 2010. It’ll be a dandy book, heavy laden with awesome photographs and vintage images from their early 20th Century catalogs.

Sounds so good I can hardly wait to read it myself!

Pretty little Wardway Home in Brighton, Illinois

A fine looking Wardway Newport in Alton, IL

A Wardway Home in northern Illinois

Yes, Sears sold barns as well as houses. These barns came in “kits” filled with pre-cut lumber, nails, roofing, doors and everything that you needed. Here’s a barn in central Illinois. The photo was taken in 2010, but it could have been shot in the 1930s. This is one of my favorite pictures.

Just out of frame is a Sears Gladstone, a fine little Sears house!

For more information on Sears Barns, look for Rebecca Hunter’s Book of Barns. Click here to buy.

Nice barn on beautiful farm

This once-lovely Sears Whitehall is in a small town in southwestern Illinois. In its happy days, it was a lovely home with clapboard siding (all cypress), probably painted a bright white with tasteful colors or the trim and shutters.

And then one day, someone thought it’d be a swell idea to wrap this fine old house with faux-logs. Sadly, this Sears Home has lost much of its value, due to this insensitive remodeling job.

This 1920s Sears Home does not look good dressed in faux logs

And then there’s this once-lovely Westly, now dripping in plastic and other PVC-based products. There’s so much that’s wrong with this house, I’m not sure what to say. However, I can say that it’s value as a historic structure is mostly lost. What a pity.

Poor little house. If this were a dog, we'd put it out of its misery.

This is a Sears Argyle, and before the "remodeling" work was done, this was a darling Sears Argyle.

To learn more about Sears Homes, click here.

Take a look at this “modern” tub. The picture below is from a 1925 American Builder, a very popular trade magazine of that era. Now I suppose on the face of it, this “combo unit” is a swell idea but c’mon, really?

The best part of a hot shower is relaxing and letting your mind drift away to a happy place. In this shower (see photo below), you’d darn well better keep your mind on the task at hand. It’s hard to imagine that any builder ever thought that this was a swell idea. And more to the point, if such a thing were offered today, it’d come with enough bright-red legally-worded warning labels to wallpaper the most spacious bathroom.

Speaking as someone who loves old houses, I’d love to know - anyone ever see one of these in real life in residential construction? Apparently, there were 60 of these put into the Mira Mar Hotel in Chicago, Illinois on Woodlawn. A quickie search on Google shows that the hotel was still in business in 1951, but I couldn’t find any more information.

Ad from a 1925 architectural magazine

A closer look at the tub/shower

Accompanying text

Part of the fun of traveling to 23 states and giving 200 talks on Sears Homes is seeing all kinds of wacky and wild stuff. One Sunday morning in 2003, as my host was driving me back to the airport (to return home to the Midwest), I saw this Sears Madelia (see second photo below). It was in Zanesville, OH (or a nearby town) and we were actually several blocks beyond this building when I told my host, “Please turn around. I think I saw something.”

He reminded me that we didn’t have much time and I told him I understood and this wouldn’t take but a second. And there - in all its painful glory - was this badly butchered Sears house. It’s actually a Sears Madelia and it was not that popular a model for Sears. (Sears sold 370 designs of kit homes from 1908 - 1940.)

The first picture (first image) is a happy, healthy Madelia in Wood River, Illinois on 9th Street. There are 24 Sears Homes in a row, a remnant from the days of Standard Oil’s purchase of $1 million worth of Sears Homes for their refinery workers. The second picture I’ve titled,

A Madelia trapped in a tavern’s body.

A happy little Sears Madelia in Wood River, IL

And here’s the Madelia trapped in a tavern’s body.

A Madelia trapped in a tavern's body

This next house is a Sears Crescent in Norfolk, Virginia. It’s a happy little Crescent with good self-esteem.

A happy Sears Crescent

And this next picture was taken by Rebecca Hunter, a kit-home expert in Elgin, Illinois.

An unhappy Sears Crescent in Illinois

Here's a Sears Westly, as it appeared in the 1919 Sears catalog

Unhappy Sears House in the Midwest. Too much plastic in one place.