An Authenticated Sears Oak Park

129 Coolidge, Barrington.

  

The Sears Oak Park.

Sears sold the Oak Park model from 1926 to 1933, positioning it as a stylish Dutch Colonial suited to prosperous suburban buyers. This Oak Park in Barrington looks very much like the catalog illustration. The house appears to retain its original 8- and 10-over-1 sash windows.  It is missing the sun room, and today the house is clad in aluminum siding rather than its original wood siding.

"See the beautiful colonial entrance with its sidelights and fan over the door, hood and columns, and the brick porch!" proclaimed the Sears Modern Homes catalog.

The same Colonial entrance, as illustrated in the 1929 Sears building materials. The gabled entry porch, with its classical detailing, was meant to convey permanence and distinction—qualities Sears increasingly emphasized in its higher-end models during the late 1920s.

The side pergola with a wood lattice trellis was an optional feature offered on many Sears models. You could purchase this option in 1926 for about $80.

  

To date, there have only been two Sears Oak Park houses definitively identified in Illinois (the other is in Wauconda). The difficulty lies in the fact that there are thousands of Dutch Colonial homes that closely resemble the Oak Park, and one of the only distinguishing features of the Oak Park is the gable-roofed entry porch. Unfortunately, that same porch was also sold by independent millwork companies other than Sears, meaning that feature alone cannot serve as conclusive evidence of Sears origin.

Lucky for us, this Sears Oak Park in Barrington is authenticated through a testimonial letter written by the original homeowner.

That's a testimonial from the owner of the Oak Park in Barrington, featured in a 1928 Sears brochure entitled "Air-Sealed Walls". Scan courtesy of Cindy Catanzaro.

The Oak Park in Barrington was built in 1927. The original owners were Ethel Drover (the letter writer) and her husband, Percy. Percy owned a Chrysler-Plymouth dealership in Barrington known as the Drover Motor Company. Not coincidentally, this dealership was located next door to the Sears Modern Homes sales office in Barrington.

The Drovers financed the construction with a $15,000 mortgage from a local bank, rather than through Sears’ own mortgage program.

Their daughter Ruth Drover later recalled the house in an interview published in The Batavia Historian:

"For the first five years of my life, we lived in an apartment above the dealership. Then we needed bigger quarters, and the family decided to build a Sears home at the edge of Barrington -- a house through the mail, so to speak."

The Drovers lived in the house until the 1960's.