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 picture of the Madelia from the 1919 Sears Catalog. The next picture 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 third picture I’ve titled, A Madelia trapped in a tavern’s body.
And here’s the 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.
We lived in a Madelia on West Lafever Street in Ossian, Indiana about 30 years ago. It was a comfortable house for 4 people. Previous owners had apparently made modifications to the interior’s original plan.
There was no longer an entry with closet. The covered porch had failed due to age and settling, and we enclosed it. Had we known that it was a “significant” house, we would have rebuilt the porch to the original specifications.