The Home Friend 1909: Sears House Plans
The Home Friend 1909: Sears, Roebuck and Company
House Plans
The Sears Catalog is long gone now, and at the end they were certainly not selling houses, but as you can see from this 1909 ad in the Home Friend they had a running concern for them at that time. How many of you live in a house built with Sears home plans?
The Curtis Company, Clinton, Iowa
While Sears was making plans, two hundred miles away in Clinton, Iowa the Curtis Lumber Company was churning out wooden bullseye rosette blocks that you might have seen in some of those Sears houses. I’m sure many of us have seen them even in old houses today. It’s hard to believe that at one time Clinton, Iowa, a town on the Mississippi River, was known as a mill town rather than the industrial city it is now.
Between the late 1850’s and 1900, the Clinton area was regarded as the sawmill capital of the nation. Huge log rafts were floated down river from Wisconsin and Minnesota, cut into lumber at Clinton, then shipped to growing communities east, west, north and south via the river and the railroads.
Clinton Convention & Visitors Bureau • 721 S. 2nd Street • Clinton, Iowa 52732 • 563.242.5702 • cvb@clintonia.com
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Filed under: Genea-Bloggers, Genealogy, History, The Home Friend
Ha, you know Sears still makes a monster catalog? They just also make a million annoying little catalogs they send to you every 1-2 days, too. So no one wants to order the monster because MANY trees will die.
Also, you can still buy those rosettes at most lumber yards and home improvement places. I put them up on my closet trim a year ago! I must have old-fashioned taste. (And I’m too lazy to figure the angle and adjust my miter saw.)
It’s really cool to see old articles like this on line. i haven’t seen anything like it before. I Haven’t gotten any of those huge catalogs in quite awhile myself.