The Wishbook Home

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When Todd and Robin Winkler and their children, Rachel and Caleb, moved into their Wakefield, Michigan, home in 2003, they had no idea it had a special history. They simply loved the four-bedroom, 2,000-square-foot home that was spacious, beautiful and affordable for the Cornerstone Church pastor and his family.

“It’s been a great house,” says Todd.

The two-story, mission-style home does have some intriguing features. The living room, which still has the original pinewood flooring, orients toward a fireplace and opens onto a stagelike, step-up landing that is one of two stairways to the upstairs bedrooms. (The other stairway goes up from the kitchen.) Outside, four distinctive attic windows rise ornately out of the roof. A garage and den area was added on, but blends mostly naturally with the original portion.

After the family had lived in the house for a time, someone came by with a newspaper clipping and some interesting news: the new Winkler home is a nearly 90-year-old Sears, Roebuck and Company catalog house. It came in pieces on a rail in 1920 and was eventually moved – after completion, by truck this time – from downtown to its location on the edge of town on 6.5 acres of mostly wooded land.

The history of the Sears homes is a fascinating one and, sadly, parallels some of the housing mortgage difficulties faced today.

Sears, Roebuck and Company set up a website section specifically about the popular “historic homes.” According to the history given, Sears sold more than 100,000 houses, cabins, barns or outbuildings from 1908 to 1940 by mail order. During that time, the company offered 447 different styles covered within three financial categories: Honor Bilt, the most expensive and best quality (including knot-free flooring and trim); Standard Built, considered best for warmer climates because of low heat retention; and Simplex Sectional, containing simple designs and often used for small cottages.

Innovations from 1908 made these “pre-cut” houses possible and could reduce the cost (ranging from $500 to $4,000) and the time needed to build them by up to 40 percent.

“There were no power saws,” Todd explains, so the pre-cut boards significantly aided construction. The home kits were ordered through the Modern Home catalog, then arrived from lumber mills in Louisiana, Illinois, Ohio or New Jersey by rail. Kits came with up to 30,000 pieces – including nails, varnish and lighting fixtures – and a 75-page booklet. The pieces were numbered for convenient assembly. Mass producing lowered costs, making homes more affordable, and were aided by breakthroughs in building materials, particularly drywall – which did not require skilled carpenters as plaster and lathe walls did – and asphalt shingles. Both asphalt and drywall increased the fire resistance of homes, too. Sears also got into home mortgages beginning in 1911 with typical loans running for five to 15 years at 6 percent interest. The loans proved to be the downfall of the Modern Home program, which folded about five years after Sears ended its loan program in 1934 when $11 million in mortgages had to be liquidated in the Great Depression.

Housing prices ranged from less than $500 to just more than $3,000. An interesting note for the Lake Superior region: One of the last kits offered in 1940 was the log “Nipigon” cottage.

The Winklers’ house is a special style called “Alhambra” and was a “Honor Bilt” model featured in the 1919 or 1920 catalog for a starting price of $1,969 (up to $3,134 with all the bells and whistles and one of Sears’ most expensive models). According to the advertisement that showed the floor plans, this Mission-style home “will appeal to anyone who likes massiveness and plenty of room.” It might be worth noting that one could also find in the Sears catalog back then record albums for 10 cents, boys high-top sneakers for $1.20 and 3-gallon butter churns for $3.

One of the eight rooms in the original house includes a beautiful entry “solarium” that connects straight to the dining room or on the left to the living room. A “mud room” in the back of the house allows for untidy family arrivals.

The true story of any house comes from the families that have lived there. This house began its life (off the train) with James and May Bedell, according to a story by Paula Mueller from the Ironwood Daily Globe. Paula quotes the Bedells’ daughter, Marge Jacobson, when she recalled “coming home from school each day and sorting through numbered pieces of lumber. She would pile the pieces by number so the carpenters could assemble the house according to plan,” Paula wrote.

Bedell, Todd Winkler says, was police chief of Wakefield at the time he ordered the house in 1920. The house later was moved from downtown to its more rural site and went through additional families before the Winklers bought it. It had new cabinetry added in the kitchen to complement the original built-in dining-room buffet. A connected garage was added, too.

The Winklers have woven their own touches into the home and property. Todd, from a farm family in Wisconsin, planted enough strawberries that the children sell them come harvest time. As befits a small Lake Superior town and a pastor’s family, the sales of 800 to 900 quarts a year are on the honor system, with the strawberries left beside the road with instructions for purchase.

Todd also built a “prayer shed” with leftover wood offered by a neighbor for him to burn. Instead, he paid another neighbor with a sawmill to plane the wood into lumber and built the small shed to get away and prepare for his sermons.

Robin and Todd met while at a Bible university in the Twin Cities area. Robin was originally from Wakefield, although her family spent some time in Nebraska when her father was laid off from the mines and joined the railroad. Now her folks run the bakery in Bessemer. Todd says the first time he saw Robin across a walkway on campus, he told the young man he next to him: “I’m going to marry that woman.”

“I just … God spoke to me,” Todd explains somewhat shyly when pressed about the encounter. Robin, definitely less shy, explains that it would be four more years before Todd reeled her in … to which Todd suggests with amusement that God also spoke to Robin, but “she was hard of hearing.”

The couple, who worked in Ohio for a time after graduating, moved back to Robin’s home area. Their children have been home schooled, although the younger, Caleb, now 14, goes to school part-time for the sports. Rachel, 16, continues studies at home. Caleb, Todd notes, who was born in the Upper Peninsula, can’t wait for winter and a chance to scoot around their property on a snowmobile.

There was no church work when the couple first moved back in 1994 and Todd worked in landscaping, something that shows in his own yard work. There was a “summer” congregation of snowbirds at the Cornerstone church, then in Bessemer. Church members agreed to take Todd on as a full-time pastor for a year-round. The church has since moved closer to them in the town of Ramsey.

Other small touches that the Winklers have added to their home are an outside wood-burner to heat the house. Friendships with local loggers help to keep the fires burning – and the heating costs down – in winter.

Strolling around their property with Todd and Robin, it’s evident that the family feels at home and at peace here. The fourth bedroom has been a boon for guests, as has the spacious interior of the home. “We do a lot of entertaining,” Todd says, for family and church.

Enjoying the house just by themselves, the couple gravitates to the wide porch outside. “We like the front porch,” says Todd, sitting on one of the outside chairs.

Adds Robin, “We just love

the house.”

Wishbook Barn

Barns could also be ordered from Sears, Roebuck and Company. One of the more prominent ones is at Lake Superior on Hauser’s Superior View Farm in Bayfield, Wisconsin. Built in the 1920s, the structure uses western fir and was hauled up hill from the train tracks by a horse-drawn wagon.

Do You Have a Sears Home?

There are a number of books out about Sears homes, including several by Rosemary Thornton. She wrote a story for The Arts & Crafts Society that helps to identify a Sears home. It is found at www.arts-crafts.com/archive/kithome/rt-searskits.shtml. There were many other kit homes sold during those years, so not all of them were Sears.

The Sears, Roebuck and Company website has wonderful information and full pages of advertisements about homes. You can access it at www.searsarchives.com.