Carlinville, Illinois — She speaks with the fervour of a woman possessed. In the cadence of a grange hall auctioneer, Laurie Flori jabs a finger at each house on her street, every one ordered from Sears, Roebuck and Co.
"That's a Carlin," she pronounces. "That's a Whitehall. That's a Warrenton. That's a Lebanon."
Starting nearly a century ago, these stately names were bestowed upon a modest line of homes that could be purchased by mail. To Flori, they are verses in a hymn to working-class America, to a time when things were built better and cost less, when everything in the Sears catalogue looked bigger and better than ordinary life.
For a while, the American dream shimmered on those pages, just as obtainable as a pair of work boots or dungarees.
A reproduction of a page from the Sears, Roebuck and Company mail-order catalog 'Book of Modern Homes, ' is shown in front of an original catalogue house in Glasford, Ill. The home was originally purchased for $725 from the catalog in 1909. (AP Photo/(Peoria) Journal Star, Fred Zwicky)
A house of one's own. Outhouse and plumbing extra. A great deal of assembly required.
Flori's worship of these houses has been known to propel her right up the porch steps of people she's never met to proclaim they have history in their joists and it's their civic duty to preserve it.
Sometimes the folks at home are intrigued. Sometimes they have no idea what she's going on about, and couldn't care less.
At all times, this stout, mile-a-minute talker is a woman obsessed: By houses that during a 32-year span could be sent away for and ordered on credit. Houses that arrived with precut lumber and numbered for easy assembly, with 750 pounds of nails and enough paint for two coats.
She is not alone in this self-appointed mission. Across the country, otherwise ordinary people have been transformed by obsession into identifying and preserving "kit houses" from Sears. They drive through unfamiliar neighbourhoods armed with flashlights and fervour, searching for a telling detail of a specific model — the gabled roof of the Warrenton, the dormer windows of the Medford.
Yet they are as similar and dissimilar as the 447 floor plans that Sears delivered.
"It's history," said Rebecca Hunter, a historian who lectures on preservation and lives in Elgin, Ill. "It's part of our heritage. And we have to do it ourselves because apparently Sears threw out everything."
Flori, true to her nature, is a little more blunt. "The only way I can explain it," she says, and falls into laughter, "is that it's like a cult."
All are fighting to identify and preserve whatever is left of the estimated 100,000 houses sold by Sears. It is not easy. No one knows where all of them are because Sears, over the years, destroyed most of its sales records. So people like Hunter and Flori rely on their wits to seek out houses and authenticate them.
Other companies offered catalogue homes — Montgomery Ward, for example, and the Michigan-based Aladdin Co. But it is Sears — because of name recognition — that gets the most attention.
The city of Carlinville is a special case. It encompasses nine blocks of nothing but Sears houses, the largest concentration in the country. The homes constituted a $1 million order placed by Standard Oil of Indiana in 1918. The fuel giant purchased nearly 200 dwellings to house an influx of miners and managers for 400-foot-shafts it was sinking in southern Illinois.
They called this new neighbourhood the Standard Addition. They built a park and schools nearby. The city extended its limits so water and sewer lines could greet new homeowners.
Young Carlinville was in love. Here were symbols of prosperity and security for a small town in southern Illinois. Here was the promise of better times ahead. In brand new homes, courtesy of the Sears catalogue — whose copies travelled their own journey, in-house to outhouse.
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The American dream arrived in a box — in scores and scores of boxes, crammed with doorknobs and oak doors, manhandled into box cars, then pulled by steam engine across ribbons of railroad track pushing West.
In that place and time, what arrived from afar inspired hosannahs. Mystery deliveries came from big cities. Creature comforts were unwrapped in new, raw land. Hope came packaged in pretty paper.
And Sears was selling the biggest consumer good of all.
