A few weeks ago, my husband and I were traveling and visited Shenandoah, Virginia. It’s a beautiful little town with a large railroad presence so naturally, I went hunting for Sears Homes. Found a handful of unremarkable Sears Homes but then I found this Sears Maytown.

This is not an unusual Sears Home but this was one the prettiest examples of a Sears Maytown that I ever saw. And it was set in one of the prettiest towns that I ever visited. It’s a real beauty.

To read more about Sears Homes, click here.

To read more about Sears Homes, click here.

It was about 11:45 pm Thursday night when Teddy walked over to my side of the bed and gave me one loud “Woof.” I opened my eyes and said, “What?” (as if she would answer). With an unmistakable intensity, she looked me right in the eye and repeated herself by saying, “Woof!”

Usually when there’s another dog outside, she’ll bark a bit and then settle down. If there’s someone walking down our city sidewalk, she’ll bark a little and then stop. But this was different.

I looked into her eyes for a minute and I swear I heard her say, “Listen, you need to get out of that bed and look outside. This isn’t just a random ‘woof’. This one’s important.”

She did not leave her station at the side of my bed but continued to stare intensely at me. I arose from my soft pink bed and toddled outside to the second-floor balcony just outside my bedroom. I looked outside and saw two highly questionable people studying my car, which was parked on the street. One was especially interested in the license plate. The other was leaning over and looking in the driver’s window.

The dog followed me out to the balcony and stood out there and barked. I was trying to figure out if I should yell or call the cops, but Teddy’s barking was enough. They immediately stood upright and walked away.

Back in the bedroom, I thanked Teddy and gave her some praise. As I settled back under the covers, I said a little prayer of gratitude for her perspicacity. And I wondered, “How did she know? And how did she know how to get my attention with that little staring maneuver? How could she hear those silent people out there, preparing to mess with my red Camry?”

One of my favorite books is Kinship with All Life and its premise is that dogs are a lot smarter and a lot more intuitive and a lot more attuned to feelings and emotions that we humans can ever understand.

Eighteen months ago, I was so exacerbated and overwhelmed with her bad puppy behavior, I frequently told her that she was about to become a Craig’s List Puppy. I’m glad I kept her!

The morning after the miscreants were messing with my car, I praised Teddy to the moon and stars and put a little something extra in Teddy’s food dish. And that afternoon, she went outside and dug a hole in the middle of my freshly planted St. Augustine grass. Guess she didn’t want me to think she was the World’s Most Perfect Puppy.

Click here to read an interesting article (with many pics) about the Sears Kit Homes in Hampton Roads.

Read more about Teddy here.

Read about Teddy and the little boy here.

When I was in the Chicago area this Spring, I spent a few days with my friend Rebecca Hunter. After tooling around town looking at lots and lots of Sears Homes, we sat down in her beautiful dining room and made a list of the Sears Homes that neither one of us had ever seen.

It’s been my experience that the 60 most popular Sears Homes represented about 90% of their sales. Over and over again, we see the same designs, the Mitchells and Lynnhavens and Gladstones and Craftons and Argyles, etc. Sears offered 370 designs of Sears Homes, and of those 370 designs, there are 108 designs that neither Rebecca nor I have ever seen. This is quite remarkable, as the two of us have seen something approaching 10,000 Sears Homes. That’s a lot of Sears Homes.

Dale Wolicki says that it’s likely that some of these designs were never sold or built. In other words, they never went beyond being pictures in a catalog. He’s probably right.

For those Sears Homes aficionados, here is the list of Sears Homes that neither Rebecca or I have ever seen:

Adams

Adeline

Alden

Almo

Amhert

Amhurst

Amsterdam

Arcadia

Atlanta

Bayside

Branford

Bristol

Cambria

Canton

Carlton

Chesterfield

Chicora

Cleveland

Coateshead

Colebrook

Corning

Corrington

Croydon

Dartmouth

Durham

Estes

Fairfield

Fulton

Gainsboro

Glen View

Hamptshire

Harmony

Harmony

Hopeland

Kenfield

Laurel

Lenox

Letona

Lorne

Malden

Marquette

Melrose

Milford

Millerton

Model # 141

Model #104

Model #107

Model #116

Model #122

Model #130

Model #134

Model #136

Model #139

Model #143

Model #157

Model #158

Model #159

Model #165

Model #166

Model #175

Model #176

Model #177

Model #182

Model #183

Model #191

Model #195

Model #198

Model #199

Model #202

Model #204

Model #216

Model #228

Model #241

Model #264P159a

Model #264P206

Model #264P207

Model #264P243

Model #264P252

Model #36

Model #59

Model #64

Model #70

Model #C2001

Nantucket

Natoma

Nipigon

Norwich

Oxford

Pennsgrove

Portsmouth

Seagrove

Sheffield

Sherwood

Silverdale

Spaulding

Springwood

Stone Ridge

Sunny Dell

Tarryton

Torrington

Trenton

Valley

Vanita

Verndale

Vinemont

Wareham

Warren

Webster

Below are some photos of Sears Homes from my recent trip to Illinois:

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!

When I learned that I was going to be writing a new book on the Sears Homes of Illinois, I called Cairo Historian Richard Kearney and asked if he could spend a day with me when I traveled to Southern Illinois.  I needed his help to find a few more Sears Homes near the site of the old mill in Cairo. Richard readily agreed to help out, which was a huge blessing, for I could not have done this without him! He and I spent an entire day traipsing around Olmstead, Tamms, Mounds City, Urbandale and many other little towns near his home in Cairo.

As we drove along bucolic country roads (some of which didn’t even show up on my GPS!), Richard was the perfect tour guide, providing an amazing bit of color about the region and its fascinating history.

A few hours into our fun day, we came to Mounds, home of this interesting old Glendale. Yes, it’s in rough shape but it is (or was) a fine old Sears Glendale. Obviously, the house has been vacant for years and years. As is evident from the photo (see below), the front porch is long gone, so I asked Richard, “Hey, you want to go around back and get inside?”

Richard, who could best be described as the consummate gentlemen with a pinch of adventurer and a heaping helping of intrigued historian, replied without a moment’s thought.

“Sounds like fun!”

So off we went, eagerly traipsing into the back yard, preparing to enter a vacant house in a run-down section of this economically depressed city. The basement windows were missing and as we walked past them, I thought I saw something move in the dark, scary basement.

“Must be a raccoon,” I thought to myself.

Richard took the lead and I was close on his heels, eager to get inside the old Sears House. As he rounded the bend and entered the backyard, a ferocious and large pitbull lunged at us, barking and spitting and snarling, and with teeth bared. Almost like a cartoon caricature, the lunging beast struggled to snap at Richard’s face but was held back by a very large chain.  Richard came to such a fast stop that I almost ran right into his back. We both took a few steps backward and one of us (I’m not sure who) said, “We need to get out of here, right NOW.”

In retrospect, I don’t know what was going on at that very deserted-looking house, but I do know that the hairs on the back of my neck stood up and I *felt* danger. Richard and I turned and ran back to my car and took off.  As we were trotting back to my car, I remember thinking about that old song, “The things we do for love…”

“Like walking into an abandoned, vacant house in the middle of a not-so-good section of town…”

Thinking about this in the calm of my pretty pink bedroom in Norfolk, Virginia, I’ve no idea why there was a vicious, angry pit bull tied up on a huge chain in the back of a long-time vacant house. I’ve no idea who or what I glimpsed in that basement. However, I’m glad that both Richard and I lived to tell the tale!

Next time you read a book on Sears Houses, remember, history has a price!