The Talk of the Town: Kit Manufacturers Negotiate the Building Industry, 1905-1929

Abstract

Urban historical scholars have neglected smaller urban centers, including their residential environments and the forces that shaped them. For a time, one of these forces was the mail-order kit home. Kit manufacturers sold houses to families throughout the United States and Canada but enjoyed their greatest success in small towns where detached single-family homes were the norm. They worked to insert themselves into local building industries: They challenged lumber dealers and ignored architects but strove to mollify the contractors on whom they and their customers depended. They attracted considerable attention and met with initial success: Emerging rapidly after 1905, they had hit their stride by 1914 and enjoyed a heyday in the 1920s. They were stricken by, and failed to recover from, the Depression in large part because lumber dealers had learned how to compete with them.

An urban ‘age of timber’? Tensions and contradictions in the low-carbon imaginary of the bioeconomic city

“…To date, the uptake of offsite construction has been geographically uneven. For example, mail order kit homes from department stores built over 400,000 US and Canadian dwellings during their early 20th century boom (Harris, 2010). This trend was of particular significance in rural spaces—beyond the reach of urban building trade unions protecting carpentry craft workers and skilled labour traditions (Kazin, 1989; Cooper, 2008).…”