Scenes Of The Season

Christmas On A Mantel: Pancho Navidad and Père Noël

I hope these scenes of Christmas delights add a lovely touch to your holidays! There are a few Sears houses mixed into the bunch -- enjoy!

A Sears Mitchell in Buffalo, New York (Thanks, Mark V.!).  Here's a blog post about the Mitchell .

A lookalike to the Sears Mitchell : Wardway Homes' Newport model. This one is in Clawson, Michigan.
Daily Bungalow has a catalog image of the Newport, here.

Sears Elmwood in Horicon, Wisconsin. It's for sale!
Learn more about the Sears Elmwood, in this blog post of mine, highlighting one in Normal, Illinois.

Beautiful Santas on display in St. Louis, Missouri.

Wonderful Christmas lights on an authenticated, custom Sears house, in Janesville, Wisconsin. (Thanks, Dan P.!)

More of the Janesville Sears custom design.

The beautiful front door on Dan's custom Sears house in Janesville.

An Authenticated Sears Alhambra In Hampton, Virginia

Thanks so much to Sarah, for allowing me to show her beautiful 1921 Sears kit house, in all its Christmas glory! 

The Berlins were the first owners of Sarah's Alhambra. This was 1918, three years before they ordered their kit from Sears.

You can follow Sarah at #ourSearsKitHouse on Instagram

Meanwhile, in Kirkwood, Missouri

These wonderful vintage homes are not Sears houses, but they sure look nice this season!

The Historic Louis Deffa House

Thanks to a post on the St. Louis History and Architecture FaceBook page, I learned about the Louis Deffa house, in the historic St. Louis City neighborhood of Soulard:

Doesn't this look lovely? This is in Monson, Massachusetts.

Photo courtesy of the Monson, Massachusetts Police Department

Another view of Mark V.'s Sears Mitchell in Buffalo, New York

A beautiful street scene in the old town of Québec City, Québec, Canada

A treasured glass ornament.

St. Louis' beautiful, historic, Powell Hall, in mid-town St. Louis.
We were there for the St. Louis Bach Society's annual Candlelight Christmas Concert. 

Do You Know About Shiny Brite Ornaments?

Sears was one of the sellers of these wonderful glass ornaments, beginning in 1937, I think. These were made in America, and created by American businessman Max Eckardt. I only just learned that these vintage glass ornaments have a name and a history... we've always just called them, "Mom and Dad's old glass ornaments". I have a small collection of them, from my parents' house... they were always on our tree, and my sisters, Lynne and Betsy, and I, loved them... and still do! Our parents married in October of 1953, and they must have bought all of their ornaments that year-- lots of Shiny Brites! I got lots of great information, and these three photos, from James and Jamie's 2012 blog post at The Cavender Diary.

Shiny Brites, for sale in the Sears Catalog

Shiny Brites... Sears, Roebuck and Company sold them

I have a box of these much like this! I also have smaller round ones, and small ones that have a little point at the bottom.

See my possible Shiny Brite? And, the beautiful porcelain snowflake my sister, Betsy, made for us in 2001.

Another of my vintage ornaments that may, or may not, be a Shiny Brite, with a favorite felt, quilted Santa, from the St. Louis Art Museum.

Do you spy the little striped ornament that comes to a point at the bottom? That's not a Shiny Brite, I have learned, but rather an ornament from the Paragon Glass company.

Other American-Made Vintage Glass Ornaments

December 24, 2019: This is an edit to what I wrote above. As it turns out, my ornaments may not be Shiny Brites. This is all new territory for me, and I'm just learning! Thanks to help from Jamie, Richard, and especially Mike, in a FaceBook Group for Vintage American Glass Ornaments, including Shiny Brites, I learned that my red, unsilvered, swirled glass ornament, is WWII era (no one was silvering the interiors during the war), and is from a company called Premier Glass Works.  I've seen one box that says that Premier was out of Irvington, New Jersey. There is a version of this ornament with silvering, too, and I have now seen it offered in a blue-green color, as well.

My own red ornament, from my family's ornaments.

There is my ornament's style, next to a blue-green one, in a box of ornaments for sale on eBay or etsy.

Here are some ornaments in a box from Premier Glass Works, for sale last April on Etsy. Apparently, you also can't trust that ornaments are from the company that the box they are in all these many years later says. Obviously, they may not be the original ornaments from that box. Still, it's cool to see the Premier Glass Works box!

The littlest vintage glass ornaments that I have, that come to a little point at the bottom, are from a company called Paragon Glass Works, out of Elizabeth, New Jersey. Mike pointed out to me that the lip of the post, where the hook goes in, is smoothed and turned in a bit, on Paragon ornaments. They originally were made with their own round hooks going right inside that post, rather than having a metal cap over the post. So, my metal cap is a replacement.

Look closely at the post of the bottom gold ornament, second from the right... you can really see the curved-over, smoothed edge of the glass, and how the hook fits right inside the glass on these ornaments. This whole box is actually only 6 inches wide, so these are really tiny ornaments, but they also have the pointed bottom, like mine. 

Another box of American-made Paragon Glass Works ornaments, probably from eBay. Love the Santa and reindeer!

Paragon's glass ornaments, as well as all of the glass ornaments (except by Premier) of the WWII era through about 1980, were made by the American company, Corning Glass, who sold blank, clear bulbs to these ornament companies, and the companies then added their own designs. I'm learning that many of these designs are very similar. So, my striped balls are from... who knows! They may be Premier, or Shiny Brite, or Corning, in fact, because it looks like Corning also sold their own glass ornaments... or, maybe this box just contained the original, plain Corning ornaments. I found this box from a listing on eBay, I think, and it is stamped with information saying that these were decorated and shipped from a company in Boston, Massachusetts. Well, my parents were living in Massachusetts at the time when they would have bought these ornaments, so it's likely that their ornaments came from the local McCallum's Department Store in town, and might have been shipped from a New England company that offered these glass ornaments. 

The site of the original McCallum's Department Store in Northampton, Massachusetts, is now Thorne's Marketplace, a collection of shops and restaurants. This photo is from a blog post about Thorne's, including great photos of the interior of what used to be McCallum's, on Visiting New England.

Whatever their origin, I love them, and I've now become very interested in all of this vintage glass ornament info :)

Gorgeous! This is not a Sears house... but, it's right behind one! In Wilmington, North Carolina, sits a historic, customized Sears model No. 167 (the early name of the Maytown). It's a real beauty, and I thank Kenyon M. for sharing its story with us. I'm not publishing photos of his house, but... he shared this view from his back window! To learn more about the Sears Maytown model, you can check out this blog post of mine, which showcases a Sears No. 118, and a Sears No. 167.

This is a pretty rare Sears house: a 1939 Sears Newcastle. This one is in West Lafayette, Indiana, and you can follow its story here, on Instagram. Many thanks to the owners, for letting me share their photo!  Lara Solonickne of Sears Homes of Chicagoland featured a Newcastle in this 2012 blog post.

From my house to yours, on this blustery, snowy day here in St. Louis, Missouri, I wish you

a very Merry Christmas,

 and 

all good tidings throughout 2020!

See our little wooden Santa out there?

Sears Gladstone-B Model In Pittsburgh, Pennsylania

Sears Gladstone, Floorplan B, circa 1930 • 1026 Homer Avenue, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Ross Township

Sears Gladstone, new 1930 Floorplan 

Though we have literally hundreds of Sears Gladstones and Sears Langstons on our national database of Sears houses in the U.S., we have only some Gladstones with the B floor plan-- the new option beginning in 1930. And, until this Pittsburgh Gladstone-B went up for sale, I don't think that we had really seen the interior of a home with that B floorplan. So, this is a real treat! And, it will help us identify other homes that we suspect may be Gladstones... especially when they have had their front porch enclosed, like this one.

The current owners got in touch with us on our Sears Modern Homes FaceBook page, after seeing a great 2017 newspaper article by Stephanie Ritenbaugh, in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. It featured our friend and fellow researcher, Karen DeJeet, who lives in a Sears Hamilton in Pittsburgh. Lots of people commented on the newspaper's FaceBook listing of the article, and I, in my role as admin of the Sears Modern Homes FB page, had been commenting back and forth with the folks who were telling us about Sears houses that they knew.

Daniel Luttner then contacted us on our FB page, to tell us about his house. They had learned, from  neighbors, about the history of the original owners offloading the building supplies for the kit, after having picked up their shipments at the train depot, and hauling them back to their lot on Homer Avenue. Because the front porch had, since then, been half enclosed, Daniel and his wife had had some trouble figuring out for certain what model their house might be. And, of course, there's always the possibility that a suspected kit house is from a different company... but, in our discussions, Daniel Luttner and I came to realize that their house was a reverse-floorplan Gladstone with the plan B layout.

One of the key details that helped us know for sure that this was a Sears kit, was the discovery that the door handle hardware on all of the interior doors, is the Sears La Tosca door handle... we've never seen that door hardware offered by any other company.

Here's La Tosca as shown in my 1930 Sears Building Supplies catalog, which is not available online. But, you can see La Tosca on this page of the 1929 Sears Building Supplies catalog.

Sears La Tosca in the Luttners' Gladstone-B at 126 Homer Avenue, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

When we find La Tosca in a house, we know that the building supplies were from Sears... and, if the house itself also matches the look and layout of one of the houses in the Sears Modern Homes catalogs (which is usually the case), then we know that the house was a kit from Sears. Ideally, we'd like to also find blueprints, or a record of a mortgage through Sears, or stamped lumber showing that the house was a kit, but we usually don't find those things, and we don't have that with the Luttners' Gladstone. Still, we're confident it is a Sears kit house!

Finding Marked Lumber In A Sears Kit House
One of the most likely spots to find marked lumber, is on exposed joists visible in the basement, but this house has a nicely finished basement, so the lumber is no longer exposed (and, even when the lumber is not covered over, sometimes the markings have simply faded over time). Sometimes, during renovations, folks find marks on the back of staircases, or on the ends of wood pieces long hidden by plaster or plasterboard walls. In this 2017 blog post of mine, about a Sears Winona in Affton, Missouri, I discussed how and why Sears marked the lumber in their kits, and showed where I found just two marked pieces in that house... very faded. Here's one of the photos I showed, followed by two nice, dark stamps found in a Sears Hamilton in Novi, Michigan (that home, owned by researchers Andrew and Wendy Mutch, was the subject of this great little NBC Nightly News segment in 2017!)

Basement lumber, marked, but nearly faded away, in that authenticated Sears Winona in the St. Louis area.

Here's Andrew holding a piece of marked lumber that he and Wendy discovered, during bathroom renovations in their Novi, Michigan Sears Hamilton. (From this interview with Kevin Tibbles, on NBC Nightly News ).

Thanks to having been enclosed behind walls for many, many decades, these end-of-board markings from Sears were still nicely visible (again, from Andrew and Wendy's house-- learn more about Andrew's research here, on his blog, Kit House Hunters .)

The Layout Of The Gladstone-B
Getting back to the Luttners' Gladstone in Pittsburgh, let's first look at the floorplans for this model.

Here's what the 1932 Sears Modern Homes catalog shows-- I've indicated the Plan-B floorplan:

You can see this for yourself, here on Archive.org.

What's interesting, though, is that, when this new floorplan was introduced, in the 1930 catalog, Sears referred to it as the B floorplan, in the text of the catalog page for this model. However, when labeling the floorplan images, they mistakenly labeled the new B floorplan as the A floorplan!:

Oops! Sears mis-labeled the images in the 1930 catalog.
 I wonder if this was corrected in other 1930 catalogs (Sears usually had a few different versions of their Modern Homes catalog each year... released in different months, and sometimes edited differently for different areas of the country).

Back in 2015, I did an extensive blog post about the Sears Langston vs the Sears Gladstone. The Langston was the original name of this model, when it was introduced in 1916. In 1925, the name was changed to Gladstone, and in 1930, the Gladstone was offered with the optional B floorplan. The model was modified again in the late years of the Sears Modern Homes era, with a re-working of the look, in the 1938 catalog. Here's a quick synopsis, but the blog post explains more and shows images:

You can read all about this model in this 2015 blog post of mine, that begins with the presentation of a testimonial Sears Langston I tracked down in McKeesport, Pennsylvania.

The Gladstone-B At 1026 Homer Avenue, has the reverse floorplan from what is shown in the catalog. This was something that Sears advertised that they were happy to do for their customers, and we see this quite often, for all models.

Reversed floorplan for the Gladstone-B Sears model

Let's start by looking at the entry vestibule and staircase location on this floorplan. Take a look at the floorplan above... this is the area in the front of the house, over to the right. The floorplan shows that there is a window at the base of the stairs, on the side, and that that there is a closet at that first landing of the staircase. And, you can just see the vestibule, to the right, in the photo below:

In a bit, I'll show you this Sears staircase newel, and these spindles from Sears, and the interior door from Sears.

There's the La Tosca door hardware, on both the closet door, and the entry door. Here's our entry vestibule, which is not present on the earlier, Plan-A floorplan. I'll show you this entry door, too -- it's from the Sears catalog, of course!

The floorplan shows how the living room is off to the side of the little hallway that you walk into, from the entry vestibule.
In the Homer Avenue house, the original front porch was enclosed. Normally, in this large entry to the now-enclosed front porch area that we see here, to the right of the TV, you would have seen a bank of three big windows, on the plan-B layout.

Here's one of the only other Gladstone-B examples that we have on our national database list. This house in White Plains, New York, shows what the original porch looks like for this model, with those Gladstone-era porch columns (they were different in the Langston era), and we can see the set of three windows:

This Gladstone-B model, on Doyer Avenue in White Plains, New York, was located by Andrew Mutch.
It has a teeny little triangular vent added to the roof. The Gladstone wasn't shown in the catalogs with a dormer, but many of them have a full dormer, like the house on Homer Avenue. This White Plains Gladstone-B also has an additional upstairs side window, not shown on the catalog image, nor on the Homer Avenue house in Pittsburgh.

Here's the Gladstone-B, shown in the 1932 catalog -- no dormer. The B floorplan also has an additional side entry, which the original floorplan did not have. 

The original Gladstone-A / Langston floorplan does not have that additional side entry. Here's that side of the house on an authenticated 1925 Gladstone-A that I located through mortgage records:

This Gladstone-A has a reverse floorplan, but we see the side, here, where the side entry is located on the B floorplan.
This house is in Hatboro, Pennsylvania.

On the original layout (floorplan-A), the staircase is accessed from a wall in the back of the living room, with a closet next to it, as you see in these examples:

Here's that staircase, in the back of the living room, with a mirrored closet door next to it. Sears offered a variety of door style and wood trim styles in this era. This authenticated 1926 Sears Gladstone-A is located in Hamilton, Ohio, and was located through mortgage research by researcher Cindy Catanzaro, who writes the blog, Sears Houses In Ohio.

This Gladstone-A image shows how the dining room comes off of the living room, in the original, A-plan layout.
This authenticated Gladstone was located through mortgage records, by Andrew Mutch, and is located in Croton-On-Hudson, New York state.

This Gladstone has Sears Stratford design door handle hardware, and trademark Sears hinges (called the ornamental half-butt hinge in this 1912 building supplies catalog) on that closet door. It's located in Kirkersville, Ohio, and was found by Andrew Mutch.

Even with a very modernized facelift, we can see that this looks like another example of an original A-plan layout Gladstone. However, the lack of closet next to the staircase, tells us that we can date this house to the earliest floorplan of this model, the earliest years of the Langston (which had no closet here). This house is located in Ellwood City, Pennsylvania, and was located by Andrew Mutch. It has non-standard porch columns, so they don't match either the Gladstone or the Langston.

As you can see with the original layout of the Langston and Gladstone, the front porch shows not a triple bank of windows, but a single window, and then a pair of windows. Here is how that looks, as seen on the Gladstone-A in Croton-On-Hudson, NY:

Gladstone-A front facade on the house in Croton-On-Hudson, NY

Let's look at the rest of the real estate listing's beautiful photos for our Gladstone-B model on Homer Avenue:

The kitchen cabinets and counters are not original, but that's no-doubt a good thin. This is a beautiful, well-equipped kitchen, with far more counter space and storage than would have been found in the original Sears kitchen.

This is a great view of how the hallway of the B floorplan leads straight from the the entry vestibule back to the kitchen.

From The Catalogs
I always love to be able to show where the various elements of our houses are shown in the original catalogs--either the Sears Modern Homes Honor Bilt catalogs, showing mostly the models, or in the Sears Building Supplies catalogs. Here are a few aspects of the Homer Avenue Gladstone, as shown in the catalogs. These catalog images are all from my own 1930 Sears Building supplies catalog, but should all be visible in this online 1930 Building Supplies catalog (a different version than I have), or in others that I have links for here on this page of my blog.

Sears La Tosca door handle hardware

One of the more attractive Sears entry doors, available in different sizes, thicknesses, and from different woods.

The Sears "regular two-panel design" interior door, which buyers could also opt for in the "Inverted" version (upside down)
You can click on the image, or pull out, to see these catalog images in larger format.

Here's one of the Craftsman style stair newels offered by Sears.

Yup, those are Sears staircase balusters!

Sears offered several options of Craftsman-style door and window trim.
The Homer Avenue house has what was called "Back Band Trim" .

I have thoroughly enjoyed learning more about the layout of the Gladstone plan-B model. What a great house this is, in fantastic condition. I know that the Luttners have enjoyed it, and now it's time for a new family to settle in. I hope they'll be as excited as we are about the piece of Americana that they are buying, and will respect and love the history of this home.