 Hello, everyone. Welcome to this our third lecture of the spring lecture series. I want to welcome you again. Hope you had a happy Thanksgiving. A Thanksgiving. Happy Valentine's Day. Goodness. And now I'd like to ask Beth, please, Beth Wood to introduce today's speaker. Beth. Hello, everyone. On this snowy icy day. It's a great pleasure to welcome back Dave Devin Coleman. Devin earned his bachelor's in art history from Colby College in Maine. And his bastards in historic preservation from the University of Vermont. Since 2006 he has served as the state architectural historian at the Vermont division for historic preservation. And you may, some of you may remember some of the past lectures that he's given there's some, we have several of his past excellent presentations online and if you go to the emails that Glenn sends each week where it tells you how to access past lectures. So if you'll be able to see his past talks on art and architecture of the New Deal in Vermont, modernist architecture in Vermont, and the historic architecture of South Burlington. So if you saw them and would like to see them again, or if you missed any of those they are available to you there as this one will be probably by next week. So it's with great pleasure I welcome back Devin Coleman to give us a talk on yet another feature of Vermont architecture today. Take it away, Devin. Great. Thank you very much. Nice to be with you all sorry that we're not in person, but this is better than nothing so I'm going to go ahead and share my screen. So, let's get going here there's a lot to cover in this topic. And as with any of these talks, I'm just hitting the high points. So there's, there's a lot of more research and information that you can seek out and I'll include a couple of references if you want to learn more. But it's a really fun topic. And the question that I like to start out with is, what is it about a kit house that makes it so interesting to us, not just people like me scholars for the built government, but to the general public as well. Even today in our modern 21st century world there's something kind of magical about the concept of being able to just order a house from a catalog, and have all the parts delivered to the building site, ready to be assembled. It wasn't just a concept pipe dream, it was a reality. And there were both small regional firms and large national corporations in the early decades of the 20th century that figured out how to do this. So, in that framework, it's also important to to understand that as much as we love to talk about kit houses and how neat they are. They were a very tiny, tiny fraction of the actual number of housing units built in the early 20th century. It was estimated that kit houses account for less than 0.3% of the total number of housing units built between 1900 and 1930. So that comes out to maybe 400,000 houses. As a producer of kit houses, Sears and Roebuck, they only built an estimated 75,000 houses nationwide. So this, this was not a massive building industry, but it was still important. And it still, you know, continues to fascinate us today. So, let's start talking about them and I look forward to sharing their history. I just want to point out that this presentation was initially developed for Historic New England, which is a New England regional history and preservation group, and they actually have a special project underway right now over the next. It's been going for about a year has another year or two. Until it's done, focusing on kit houses of Burlington, Vermont. So this lecture was one piece of that larger project and if you want to know more about that, and certainly encourage you to visit historic new england.org and learn what other events and programs they have related to this project. So to get us started. Let's take a step back from the early 20th century, and look at a few key events in the 19th century that paved the way for the development of kit houses. In the early to mid 19th century, there's a major shift in how houses are built in the United States. And that's a transition from heavy timber framing, post and beam mortise and tenon joinery to lightweight balloon framing. This construction technique was developed in the 1830s in Chicago, and balloon framing makes use of many lightweight consistently sized wooden framing members joined with wire nails. This system eliminated the need for the skilled expertise of a timber framer, so that a small crew like the one shown here could assemble a house with relative ease and little skilled labor. Balloon framing also allowed for greater variety of floor plans and building forms. And thus we see the great range of wood framed house styles that appear in the mid 19th century, with any combination of towers bay windows porches dormers decorative details. These were all easily executed when working with standard pieces of milled lumber. Balloon framing was superseded by platform framing, which usually utilized shorter members and stacked the decks of the building one on top of the other. And most kit houses utilized platform framing. The next important development was the creation of the portable house, as it was known in 1861 the Boston firm of skillings and Flint received a patent for an improved portable house and published a catalog of their simple house kits in 1862 The skillings and Flint was a subsidiary of Lawrence Barnes and Company, that name may be familiar to people in Burlington, because they were the major lumber company based in Burlington. And at this time Burlington was the third largest lumber port in the nation. After Chicago and Albany, Canadian timber was delivered to Burlington by a late Champlain where Barnes and Company would mill it into consistently sized pieces. The adjacent railroad lines enabled Barnes and Company to transport its milled lumber to Boston for fabrication into portable houses. And then those house kits could be shipped anywhere in the world. What's shown on the right is a view of the Burlington waterfront believe it or not looks quite different today. Filled with piles of lumber stacked between the railroad tracks in the foreground and Lake Champlain in the background. In an 1862 news article about the Barnes operation in the Burlington Free Press proclaims that, quote, the newest invention of the Yankee brain is a sexual portable house furnished neatly packed in boxes. In less time than it takes to tell it, a tree is put into a mill and sliced up into a dwelling house, a church, a barn, a railroad depot or a military hospital. Now the actual process was slightly more complicated but you get the idea. In addition to producing physical buildings companies like this were also laying the groundwork, almost psychologically if you will to get the general public to think about and embrace the notion of a house being prefabricated. And that maybe it would be okay to order your parts from a company and have them pre cut and shipped to the building site instead of hiring a contractor to cut everything to length on the job and put it together. It was this this was a really stark contrast to the traditional building method where a house is wholly built on site by a contractor. Now moving into the 1880s and 1890s. We see American cities beginning to change how they grow and develop, expanding streetcar networks, open new areas of land for development outside of the urban core, and these resulting sub urban neighborhoods, the suburbs become home to what is the practical suburban house. And this is a structure with modern conveniences such as indoor plumbing, central heating and electricity presented in a compact, well designed, single family home. And two of the most popular house types were the bungalow and the four square, shown here, both of which were very popular kit house designs as well. Finally, the last piece of the puzzle was an act of Congress in 1893. When they passed legislation to establish a network of rural mail routes and mail carriers who delivered and picked up mail and personalized roadside mailboxes. You're probably wondering what on earth, this has to do with kit houses, but think about it. Suddenly companies like Sears and Robach had the means of delivering merchandise catalogs and goods directly to the mailbox of anyone anywhere in the country. By 1908, for example, one fifth of all Americans received the Sears catalog at their house. The mail order era had arrived. And once consumers were accustomed to purchasing everything from clothing and medical supplies to lighting fixtures and fireplace mantles from their mail order catalog. It really wasn't that great of a leap to start offering complete kits of parts to build a house. Our topic today is kit houses and think of these like a Lego kit. You get a box of parts with an assembly manual for each piece telling you where it goes within the overall design of the building. Now Legos come in a cardboard box, whereas kit houses came in a boxcar. As you can see on the right here. Everything was included in the shipment from floor joists and siding to roof flashing nails and paint. It was literally the whole house. Now kit houses are not to be confused with panelized houses. Think of a gingerbread house with directions on how to join the building components together. For example, the Hodgson unit system utilized a series of six foot by 12 foot wall panel units assembled in the factory, which could then be combined in various configurations and bolted together on site. But because these are largely assembled and built in a factory and then joined together on site. They're not considered true kit houses. Nor should kit houses be confused with prefabricated houses. A prefab house is like the dollhouse you buy fully assembled at the store, or as this great photo on the right, delivered on a truck and dropped into place. Finally, we have other buildings that are built from plans only with all the materials and labor provided by the developer or the builder or the owner. And once the builder had that set of plans, the house could be replicated over and over, leading to some mistakenly assume that they are kit houses because they see multiples of the same design. But it was simply a builder using the same set of architectural plans. A very style house in Burlington, for example, was built from plans purchased from the National Builder magazine in 1917, and it was built by a local contractor. So to be clear, for the purposes of this talk, the term kit house refers to buildings that were advertised in and ordered from a catalog that were manufactured at a central plant sawmill of some sort. And delivered in unassembled pieces to the building site, and then constructed. Due to the popular name brand name brand recognition of Sears and Roebuck, the tier term Sears kit house has become essentially a catchall for any small early 20th century house that has the characteristics of a bungalow or a four square. Sears was just one of several principal producers of kit houses. These companies came into the field in slightly different ways, and there's still debate about who was the first. But we do know that Aladdin homes of Bay City, Michigan, and Sears Roebuck and company of Chicago, both published catalogs featuring complete kit houses in 1908. The award in company followed suit in 1909 with their, their own catalog. As did the Chicago house reckon company later rebranded as Harris brothers. In 1916, the Gordon band time company entered the field of ready cut houses. And let's use this 1916 Gordon band time catalog to go through the process of selecting and ordering your new kid house. The first step, of course, is the fun part, looking through all the different designs reading the description studying the floor plans and pondering the glowing testimonials of previous customers that are printed on almost every page of the catalog. Is it the big handsome bungalow, or do you prefer the practical for room cottage at a very modest price, or maybe you really prefer the square house of striking design. The descriptions and names of these properties are wonderful. I imagine having to be the copywriter coming up with ways to explain the amazing virtues of these houses that ultimately are all pretty much the same. But they did a great job. In addition to the house plans and descriptions the catalog also contains a few pages explaining the process of fabricating the houses. In this case illustrated with a series of photos that show the lumber being cut milled and packed. And it was part of getting the public comfortable with the notion of of ordering a house as a kid of parts from a catalog. They're showing you. This is how we do it, you know there's this is just very practical and logical. And what's great about this. This page from the Gordon band time catalog if we look closer. You can see that this photo in the lower right actually shows a central Vermont railroad car with all the parts for Gordon band time house, perhaps somewhere in Vermont. This house is still standing. Also in the catalog is a simple two page order form. And that's all it took to start the process. Just fill in the blanks with the house model number. The catalog every house had its own code. You fill that in and specify the materials that you need. Indicate how you're going to pay. That's very important. You could send cash with your order, or you can have a bank guarantee your payment upon delivery of the goods. And specify your paint colors and the stains for the woodwork, and you were good to go. These pages are from a series and robot catalog, and they show the building process at all of the building components for the house were manufactured and packed at a centralized facility, and then shipped by a rail to the nearest railroad station. So your builder would load the pieces onto a truck, transport everything to the building site, and get to work putting the house up. This, as these photos show the construction process is not unlike standard site built house construction. You have all the pieces they get nailed together. The roofing, the cheating, roofing, doors and windows are put in. The primary difference being that all of the framing materials are already cut to length. And this is something that the kid house companies really emphasized was how practical and efficient their products were. The design, for example, calculated that the construction of an average five bedroom house required 2,940 individual cuts with a hand saw by the builder on site with a kit. However, all of that cutting is done by machinery in the factory. So you're not paying your builder to do that work on site. There's no very little waste, as we see in the catalog comparison of a kid house on the left and a house of standard construction on the right. You can see the kid house job site is neat and tidy. The other house site built with the quote older hand saw method as a messy building site and two truckloads of cut off lumber scraps that will have to be hauled away. Now that we know a little bit about the origins and history of kid houses, let's talk about how to research and identify them because that's part of why these houses are so fascinating is that it's really fun to look around your neighborhood and try to pick out like which which houses have the characteristics of a kid house and can they actually be identified. So the first step is to educate yourself about the variety of kid houses that are out there, and their specific characteristics. Fortunately, a lot of research has been done on this topic in recent years, and the there are some excellent books available about the leading manufacturers of kid houses. Some are shown here, and there are many others. The book about Montgomery Ward, the history and field guide to Wardway homes is especially useful, because in addition to information about Wardway homes, it includes brief summaries about many of the other kid house companies that were in operation at the time. And if you really want to dive into the history of pattern books and kid houses, going all the way back to the founding of the nation. Then I highly recommend Richard cheeks 2013 book, selling the dwelling, the books that built America's houses 1775 to 2000. And I believe this book which has been out of print is being reprinted in paperback version soon so you should be able to find that online. And of course, there are numerous websites and Facebook groups dedicated to kid houses, far too many to list here, but easily found online. One of the best resources for original copies of old kick house catalogs is the building technology heritage library, which is housed on the Internet archive and maintained by the Association for preservation technology. And the website, www.archive.org is shown on the screen here. This is the best source for free online access to dozens of kid house catalogs scanned in their entirety. Looking through these old catalogs also reveals that the companies were not only producing cute little bungalows and four square houses. Some of their designs were quite grand, as shown on this page, this compilation of images of completed projects in the 1911 seers catalog. Many of these are quite substantial and grand houses. And you will also find that the companies are not limiting themselves to kit houses. There were entire catalogs devoted to farm buildings, including barns and houses poultry houses silos. Because these catalogs of farm buildings are often overlooked. Most of the discussion about kit houses is about residential buildings. But these farm buildings, especially in a state like Vermont. These were very important in the rural parts of the of the state. Most of the companies also produce smaller simpler buildings as well. This 1915 Aladdin catalog includes, in addition to houses, garages, and summer cottages. So you could get your, you could order your main house from Aladdin with a garage, and then you could order your nice little getaway cabin for your camp on the lake. And even has a few pages devoted to furniture and fixtures. So you could order your house and furnish it all at once. So, before you strike out to find kit houses in your community. It's useful to think about where you might find them, because they're definite areas that you can identify pretty easily. And speaking, they will show up in neighborhoods that were developed in the first decades of the 20th century, usually adjacent to older 19th century downtown core areas. For example, this 1890 map of Burlington shows the city's development. Just at the start of suburban expansion. The yellow area shows the core of Burlington that was largely developed by the end of the 19th century. The blue on the left is Lake Champlain, and downtown is. The industrial waterfront between the two. And then in the early 20th century developments were built adjacent to that urban core, still close enough to major roadways and trolley lines, but on previously undeveloped land that had been used for farming or been part of large estates. These areas are shown in green, generally southeast and north of Burlington. These areas that, you know, even in 1890 were still large, undeveloped tracks of land, but then quickly is that suburban development grew, got filled up with new subdivisions within these neighborhoods. You'll find a lot of houses that look like these. These are all examples just from around Burlington actually on the same street, almost straight same neighborhood. These are all examples of that practical suburban house compact, well designed, well organized, simple houses. Most of these are probably built by a contractor from a set of plans but some of them could be kid houses. Some of the features that are common to kid houses are shown here. There are distinctive brackets on the porch and roof eaves, such as the five piece bracket shown here on the left on a Sears Winona house, and you can see it has a horizontal piece, a vertical piece, two diagonal pieces. The fifth and final little connector piece. So that five piece bracket is a real hallmark of a Sears kid house. And on the right is the Pomona model house from Aladdin with its distinctive horizontal brackets shown in close up here. Another common feature of kid houses is the grouping of porch or entryway columns in sets of two or three. The first might be a Sears Crescent model and note the two sets of three round columns supporting the projecting portico. And on the right is a close up view of the very heavily kind of bloated, if you will, square columns on a Montgomery Ward house. It's an oversized, very distinctive, say taper upward dramatically at the top. You can also look for small bump outs on the sides of kid houses, which were often included as an economical means of increasing floor space on the main level without building a larger foundation. You can see this feature clearly on this side elevation. Where the bump out projects beyond the concrete block foundation wall. Gordon van Tyn ready cut home number 538, as shown in the 1916 catalog on the right includes a sizable bump out on the side elevation. Without this feature, the dining room highlighted here would only measure 138 square feet. But with that one little bump out, it measures 161 square feet, an increase of 23 square feet. And in a house of this size. That's an important addition of space and an otherwise compact and efficient building footprint. So all of these features that you frackets columns bump outs are clues to identifying a kid house, but there's certainly not definitive indicators. There are kid house models that don't include any of these features. But there are features to keep an eye out for that may help identify a kid house, along with other information. So, once you've scoped out your neighborhood, you kind of know where to look, and you know some features to look for it's time to hit the streets and start exploring visual identification involves matching an existing house with a similar house in a catalog. But this is only the starting point and does not result in definitive documentation of a kid house. So shown here is a page from the 1919 Aladdin homes catalog showing the shadow lawn model. And here is a house on Flynn Avenue in Burlington that looks suspiciously similar. As does this house on Charlotte Street, also in Burlington. If we look at the catalog, and these two extant examples. They have a lot of things in common. Does this mean that we have two examples of the Aladdin shadow lawn house here in Burlington. Based on this visual information. The answer is a definitive maybe matching a rendering and a catalog to an extant house is not definitive proof that it's actually a kit house. Perhaps one of these on Flynn or Charlotte Street was built from a kit. And then the builder just use that plan set to build another one using his own materials, or maybe neither one came from a kit maybe they were mail order plans, or maybe they both did. The only way to know for sure is to conduct a physical inspection of the building itself. Another way to identify kid houses is to conduct research using historical records and the catalogs themselves. For example, I mentioned earlier that all the catalogs made extensive use of these wonderful customer testimonials where they write in and say how fantastic and easy it was to build their kid house. The 1953 Aladdin homes catalog includes the Greystone model shown here. It also includes two testimonials from owners who purchased and built the Greystone. And most importantly, these testimonials include their hometown. So we know that someone with the initials are CW in Chester deep over month, built Greystone model number one. As did someone with the initials MAC and White River Junction. Using the 1953 city directories for these towns. It may be possible to identify who are CW and MAC were, and where they built these houses, then field verification would be the final step in the identification process. The building catalogs would even list specific places where a mod a certain model had been built, such as this page for the Maytown in the 1921 Sears catalog. Right down in the very corner it says this house has been built at Lyndonville Vermont, Brisbane, Pennsylvania and you know New York New Jersey Maryland Ohio. According to the catalog we know that there's one of these houses in Lyndonville Vermont. Fortunately it has that very distinctive corner tower. So it really only took a few minutes with Google and Street View. To find this house on Raymond Street in Lyndonville. They're very similar, although you will note that they are reversed mirror images if we flip the photo. They are pretty spot on, although even here you notice the second story in the catalog has two windows. Here there's only one window. Was that a choice made during construction. There's a window filled in later on. So again, this isn't definitive proof, but it's, we're getting closer. This is the fact that the catalog says this model was built in Lyndonville, and there's an example that is really close to that catalog image. This would be one to check out and do a physical inspection. Another tactic is to search old newspapers for references to kit houses. However, if you search kit house, you really won't find much. This is actually a more recent term. And in the early 20th century, these houses were more often referred to as ready cut houses. For example, this notice in the Vermont Journal in 1916 notes that quote, a ready cut house is the first of its kind being erected in Windsor Vermont on halls terrace. Fortunately for us, Hall Street, as it is known today, only has four houses on it. And it's shown here looks like it has all the right elements of a kid house. It's a simple form, a two story box with a front porch. Clabbered on the first story shingle on the second story that was a very common treatment for exterior sighting, some decorative treatments on the eaves, and so on, but is it a kid house. And this collection can provide definitive proof. Sometimes you get really lucky and find an article such as this one, which identifies the owner, the street, and the manufacturer of the house. And here we have not just one but two, a Montgomery Ward house and a sterling house. And sterling homes was another manufacturer of kit houses based in Bay City, Michigan. And this further emphasizes the fact that kit houses are being produced by many more companies than just the well known Sears and Roebuck Company. City directory research should easily identify where Joseph Durkey and Leland Wood lived. And then a site visit to the property could help confirm whether or not a kid house exists. How does one go about inspecting a potential kid house for clues as to his origin. I keep saying physical inspection is what you have to do. So there's several things to look for and they vary according to manufacturer. Some are easier to spot than others. And oftentimes, these telltale clues are concealed by later alterations and interior improvements. One of the first things to look for is stamped framing members, which may be exposed in the attic or the basement of the house. Sometimes these numbers are revealed when a wall is opened up during renovations. These are examples from a Sears kit house. The lumber on the left is stamped. It's an ink stamp V29T, it looks like, with an alphanumeric code. And that code corresponds to the set of building plans that came with the kit. In other cases, the alphanumeric code is stamped on the end of each board, which means the code is completely hidden once the board is put into place. These images from Gordon Bantine catalogs show how their lumber was stamped, which sometimes included written labels, such as we see on the left, porch step stringer. You can see something like that stamped on your stair stringers. That's a pretty good indication that it came from a kit. And on the right is a diagram of how all these pieces labeled and bundled together would be mapped out within your set of plans to correspond with their specific use and location on the building as it was being built. Sometimes the lumber is not stamped and instead has numbers written in grease pencil as we can see here. Sometimes there's no marked lumber. Bottom line, if you can find stamped or marked lumber and can correlate the markings to a manufacturer, then that's a really good chance that it's an authentic kit house. Another clue to look for is paper labels that may remain attached to the back of trim inside the house. For example, these mailing labels were found on the back of pieces of trim, baseboard and door framing pieces. But you'll see that nowhere do they say Sears and Roebuck. However, the return address, 925 Homan Avenue, Chicago, gives us a clue because that's the address of the headquarters of Sears and Roebuck. A word of caution, however, these labels simply indicate that the lumber for these specific parts came from Sears and Roebuck, but not necessarily that the entire house is a kit house. Because you could build your own house and then just order all your trim from Sears. So these trim pieces could have been purchased by the builder from Sears and Roebuck and just used to finish up an otherwise standard built house. You can also look for physical components of the house such as plumbing fixtures and hardware that may provide clues about the origins. For example, the hinges on this built-in bookcase are the same hinges as those shown in the 1920s Sears modern catalog. But again, these are clues, not definitive proof, since Sears also sold hardware like this separately in its catalogs and stores. Sometimes the name of the kit house manufacturer would be included on the hardware itself, such as this wonderful doorknob from an Aladdin house. It's a really clear indication that it's an Aladdin kit house because Aladdin did not sell parts like the way that Sears and Montgomery Ward did. And if you're really lucky, the owner of the property may still have documents related to the ordering and delivery of the house, such as order forms, shipping inventories, receipts, and so on. And some construction manuals may be present. On the left here we have the manual on how to put together your Wardway ready cut home. Or my favorite, which we see on the right, is the official certificate of deposit on building materials for a kit house. This one is from Sears and Roebuck and clearly says it is for the Osborn model in 1928. This is about as definitive as you can get. In summary, positive identification of verified kit houses is really difficult to do. And it's usually achieved through a combination of visual comparison to known designs, archival and documentary research, and physical inspection. So that brings us today to today. And the question. What happened. Why aren't we still able to order houses by mail? Most of the major firms selling kit houses fell on hard times during the Great Depression, followed by the moratorium on new construction during World War Two. Despite a slight increase in sales following the end of the war by the mid 1970s, almost all of these firms, the ones listed here, had gone out of business or stopped marketing kit houses. Some of them ran into trouble with the financing packages that had been offered to homeowners to build their houses. Sears, for example, underwrote thousands of mortgages for their kit houses in the 1920s. And then they were faced with the unenviable task of foreclosing on their own customers and repossessing their homes in the 1930s, when the homeowner couldn't could no longer make the mortgage payments. As previously noted, kit houses accounted for a ministerial fraction of the total number of housing units built in the early 20th century. So why are we still talking about them today 100 years later. Yes, the houses that remain are very nice buildings, they are very well built their quality homes, and they're fun to research and identify. I argue that actually the real importance of these early 20th century kit houses and programs to sell them lies not in the buildings themselves, but rather in the mail order catalog network, through which the ideals of what a middle class single family American house could or should be was disseminated nationwide. These catalogs served a dual purpose of both reflecting existing ideals and influencing new housing designs. They made different architectural styles accessible to anyone anywhere in the country. For example, you could get the Magnolia model shown here from Sears, which based its design on long fellows home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And you could build it in North Carolina, or Ohio, or anywhere you wanted. Here's the North Carolina model. So it opened up these styles to a much broader reach beyond their typical geographic region, or perhaps you're really taken by the mission style Alhambra, but you live in Burlington. No problem, even if you didn't order the actual kit house from Sears and Roebuck, the catalog images and floor plans were often enough for a homeowner to communicate to a builder. What they wanted is the house shown here, which is in Burlington, an actual example of a Sears Alhambra. And there are some notable differences in the designs, but there are also a lot of similarities. And I think we can all admit that the mission style is not of wide renown in Vermont. So there's a good chance that this house in Burlington was at least influenced by the Sears catalog descriptions. The floor plans of the Alhambra, even if it's not an actual example of the Alhambra kit house. So while the actual number of kit houses built was nominal, the influence of the kit house catalogs was enormous, and guided the development of communities across the country. And that to me is the real value of studying kit houses today. One of the most important examples that we can positively identify are physical reminders of this important period in American architectural history. And I thank you very much, and I'd be happy to take any questions. Thank you, Devin that was fascinating and we do have some questions for you. As kid houses grew in popularity, was there a backlash from traditional home building companies in view of the kid houses lower cost and that they were produced by out of town firms. Absolutely. How could there not be. It's really interesting even looking in old copies of the Burlington Free Press. There are advertisements from local builders. There are architects saying, you know, be careful. You don't know who's really designing your house with one of those kid houses, you don't know the quality, you don't know if they're trained. If you hire us, you know, we're your neighbors, we know you. You know us, you can trust us. So that that was definitely a concern in the field of ready cut manufactured prefab housing. People have been trying it throughout the entire 20th century they're still trying today, and it just never catches on for that very reason because, you know, local specialists, your builders your plumbers your electricians your carpenters. If this timing all assembled and doesn't need any work, then they're out of the job. So, there was definitely some push back from local trade groups. For some kid houses affordable enough to allow renters to buy their first homes. Did this have an impact on the housing scene in general. Yes, I would certainly think so. There were definitely models that were, you know, very basic, you know, one story, 700 square feet, you know, little living room, combined with the dining room a small kitchen and maybe two bedrooms. And an entry level house could certainly be within in reach of people wanting to move out of rental units. And also, interestingly, Aladdin homes. I think had either a complete catalog or a section of their catalog focused on marketing their product directly to women and teachers and young professional women. And saying, Hey, you know, you're in the workforce now. Wouldn't you like to have your own home. And here's how maybe you can afford your own house. So very interesting marketing. And the fact that they also offered mortgages. That was another piece where borrowers who maybe typically couldn't get a mortgage from a big bank. They could do racial restrictions or gender, you know, usually the man would be the one getting the mortgage, but these companies would give mortgages to anyone. So that was another really important way that people who had been shut out of the housing market could maybe get their foot in the door. Interesting. How insurable were these houses in general, and please comment on insurance or liability issues related to get houses that Sears Robach and other vendors offer insurance policies that controversies arise over who was responsible for damages Sears the owner of the local builder. That is a good question I don't know. Don't know about the insurance piece. I mean, the difference of the quality of the houses. They were great houses. They were. It's funny because today, you know, Sears. If they even have any stores left. I mean, we kind of think of Sears today as where you get your washer and dryer or your lawn mower discount, you know, lower end goods. At this point, early 20th century Sears was the king of retail, and they were quality. They were top of the line. And these houses were built with excellent materials, really good quality lumber. They were very solidly built, and you see when you find one today, they're typically in great shape because they are very well built houses they were not in any way, you know, discount or, you know, lower grade housing options. Are there any particular regions or places in the United States that have a very high number of kid houses. Definitely the Midwest would I think would have the highest concentration because that's frankly where a lot of these businesses were based Michigan, Minnesota, Illinois, because that's where all the lumber was. You know that's that's where the sawmills and the factories were producing these houses and yes they could put them on a real car and shipped them anywhere in the country. But you'll definitely find large concentrations in those Midwestern states, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan would certainly be the largest concentrations. Is there a connection between kid houses and Frank Lloyd Wright. There is the not not directly right did have. He did develop his own kid house. I forget what they were called they were concrete block kid houses. I think maybe only three were built. But he, you know right was very interested in this low cost affordable quality housing as well. But certainly writes ideals of wanting to design buildings with built in furniture. A lot of these kid houses would come with built in cabinets shelving so that the, the new owner could move into a house and not have to that you know they've just bought a house. Then you have to buy everything to furnish it. And if the house can actually come with some of those things built in so much the better. So that was certainly a connection to right. And then the, I'd say some of the simplified designs of some of the kid houses and there were actually prairie style kid houses. The, some of the more craftsman style kid houses definitely pick on pick up on rights aesthetic very clean horizontal kind of long and low building forms. Are there any particular neighborhoods in Burlington or Winooski where we might see a number of kid houses. Yes, around Burlington. The areas that I'm most familiar with are on the south side of downtown in the neighborhood known as the five sisters neighborhood, which is Caroline Street, Charlotte Street, Marion and Margaret Catherine. That neighborhood in then south of Flynn Avenue in a neighborhood called the addition is another several several blocks of houses in there that, you know, I drive through there and just like that that's one I bet that's one. But again, we never know for sure. On the east side of downtown, probably some neighborhoods in there around like Robinson Terrace around the university. These were great houses for like faculty and people working at the nearby university. That's another good place to look for these houses. Winooski? Yeah, Winooski, I'm sure there would be there are some amazing bungalows in Winooski. I want to say kind of in the northeast quadrant of the city. Basically, if you can find a map that kind of shows development patterns of the area and find out where things were being built in the 20s and 30s and that's, that's where you want to look. Right. So, you know, for broader in the state, we find concentrations, basically any town that was had really good access to a railroad line. You know, Lindenville, St. Aldens, Rutland, White River Junction, you know, because these were all shipped by boxcar, so it made sense. You wouldn't necessarily order a kid house and then have to load it all up into your truck and drive it 70 miles into the wilderness. You're going to keep it pretty local, so. Is the concept of kid houses being applied to the townie tiny house movement nowadays. It is, I do get a laugh sometimes out of the tiny house projects that I see and we fit all of this, you know, living space for two people into 700 square feet. It's like, well, yeah, they did that in 1910 in a Sears house. They're reinventing the wheel. Yeah, it definitely has come around to these are practical houses. You know, they suited the needs one of the houses that I looked at in the five sisters neighborhood. One of the bigger models two stories but still maybe a thousand square feet. And I talked to a man who grew up there with his like seven siblings, you know, they had 10 people in that house. And it's a house today that we would think oh that's good for like in a couple with no kids, you know, so that the perspectives has changed so radically. Yes, I think actually the small house movement could learn a lot by looking at these old catalogs and seeing how these floor plans were laid out and how they worked in storage and living units and built in to make these really compact efficient living spaces. Great. I think that's all the time we have Devon but thank you so much and driving around some of these neighborhoods. Take a look around and you start seeing them. Oh yes Devon this has been so interesting thank you so much. Thank you. Thanks everyone see you next week.