A History of Dayton and the street of Sears homes
First off, before I start this blog post, I want to give a humongo shout out to Cindy Catanzaro -- most of this blog post would have not been possible without her help (we're talking hours of help)! Also, this blog post is a bit longer since it includes a relatively quick history of Dayton.
So when Cindy and I first met last fall, she gave me a re-printed 1926 Sears Modern Homes catalog. I was just getting started with searching for Sears kit homes, and she said that most of the ones in Dayton would most likely be found in this catalog. As I excitedly looked through the pages, I came across this image.
Imagine my surprise when I found my own hometown mentioned in the very first photos of the catalog! If you take a closer look, you notice... these are NOT Sears kit houses. None of them match any models that Sears was producing at the time. I asked Cindy about it later and she told me that while the builder may have not used Sears building plans, he probably did use Sears materials to build the homes. Ahhh, okay, makes sense. I asked her if she had ever found this street of houses, she said that she had been looking for a while but hadn't ever come across it.
Well, Dayton did go through a bit of a transformation during parts of the 20th century. The first big transformation was the 1913 flood. This event still ranks as Ohio's worst natural disaster of all time, with over 467 deaths, mostly in the Miami Valley region. From the Dayton Daily News website: "The storm began with 58 mph wind gusts on March 21st, 1913. Two days later, Easter Sunday, the rain began dumping 8 to 11 inches over a five day period. Another two days later, with the Great Miami River rising nearly two feet an hour, the levees failed. (...) The amount of water that passed through the river channel in Dayton equaled the amount of water that flows over Niagara Falls in a four-day period." This massive flood transformed Dayton over time, with the city rebuilding, but never quite forgetting.
After the flood, in the years 1915-1929, Dayton hit its stride with the Golden Age of Growth. Also known as "the land of a thousand factories," the city population hits an all time high of 152,600 in 1920. By 1940, that number had exploded to nearly 211,000. With that, came a lot of home building - we have found that kit homes were popular in Dayton, especially Sears kit homes since Norwood Door & Sash was located just south of us, in the city of Norwood, which was an enclave of Cincinnati.
In the 1950's, and 60's, the population of the city is at its peak at 262,332. Modern freeways were being built through the heart of Downtown Dayton to account for local traffic and travelers. Entire parts of neighborhoods were wiped out by building I-75 and US-35. City officials called it "a period of major planning activity," but most residents called it "growing pains." After this, many residents of Dayton left for the suburbs for various reasons. In my opinion, I think Dayton is still recovering from that time period.
Just to give you an idea of how crazy it got, Dayton's population today is 140,500. The city is slowly coming back to glory, but it does take time.
If you need a tl;dr of that little section, here it is: 1913 flood destroyed city, city flourished after rebuilding, then got destroyed again when major highway system was build in 1950's and 60's, a lot of residents mass exodus to the suburbs.
Okay, now that we have a little bit of history of Dayton, lets get back to Sears homes.
So now that we know Dayton had some very transformative periods, there was about a 30% chance that the street of Sears houses had been destroyed over time. BUT even with that knowledge, I still had been searching. It had been eluding me until early last week.
I give you North Ardmore Ave, Dayton, OH.
Just for reference, here's the catalog photo again.
So you're probably going "what in the world, there is no way that is the street!" You probably noticed the obvious missing houses in the picture I took, the overgrown weeds, the boarded up parts.... yeah. It was pretty sad to see. Hopefully we can see some re-investment in the area soon enough.
The way I found this street was by looking at the porch roofs and the second/third floor dormers of each house.
First house in the photo -- it's got that little bumpout on the porch roof.
Second house -- noticeably missing, get to that in a second.
Third house -- Porch roof matches, third floor dormer matches.
Fourth house -- also missing.
Fifth house -- hard to see, but it's a two story with a big shed dormer for the second floor.
Sixth house -- still being built.
Addresses for these homes range from 105 N Ardmore Ave to 127 N Ardmore Ave.
After digging around on the auditor website, the second house was knocked down sometime after 2011. Below is a photo before it met it's demise. It's a match!
The fourth house had met its fate way before the Montgomery County auditor website was online, which was circa 1998. But with four of the five houses matching, it's certain that I have found the street.
Here's the cincher -- in the 1922 Sears Modern Homes catalog, they ran a clearer photo of the street than in the later editions.
So now, you can clearly see the fifth and sixth house. The fifth house has a second story shed dormer, the sixth house has a very noticeable roofline up top.
Here are those houses on Google maps today -- rooflines match! When I found this little tidbit originally, I was flippin' out! We're talking like messaging Cindy "OMG!!!! I FOUND THE STREET!!!" multiple times.
So after we both calmed down, Cindy got down to researching North Ardmore Street to find some answers.
Before we get started, let me show you the area that the ads are talking about. Here's a map of what the area looks like now. From Cindy's research, we found that G.W. Nicholas bought plots of land in this area and had them developed -- other ads mention Anna St. later on, so he must've built the homes on North Ardmore and Second St before anything else. The red dots are the 6 houses I mentioned above, the blue lines are the other houses mentioned in the ads below, which means some of them were also built with Sears materials.
So from this, we can deduce that the houses were built in early 1917. Here's the newspaper blurb from the Dayton Herald (no longer in print) to support that.
And here is where we first come across G.W. Nicholas. We did a LOT of research on him, enough for another forthcoming blogpost, but he is pretty much responsible for about a third of the development of the west side in Dayton. This was one of his very first plats that we found.
Above, there's another ad in June of 1917. He's added on some more houses! In the first ad, it said it cost $2,000 to build each house. In this ad, it says Nicholas is selling them for $3,150. Not too shabby.
Here's where it gets interesting. Not a lot of people today might know the timeline of what was going on during this period. On April 6th, 1917, the US entered World War I. So in this ad, Mr. Nicholas seems a bit more desperate to offload his houses. It's been six months since they've been advertised, and clearly he's hit a wall (the words "real bargain" strike a chord) with selling them.
Here's the last ad that we see for this particular group of houses - he's offering quite the deal. He says in the ad, "the reason I can offer this low price is that I bought all materials at prices prevailing last year and in large quantity." From the first ad, we can see that he spent $34,000 overall to build them.
I ran the numbers through two inflation calculators -- honestly, I did the second one because I couldn't believe the first one. So according to the inflation calculator at in2013dollars.com, $34,000 equaled out to be around $661,300.
At the inflation calculator at Savings.com, it equaled out to be around $722,570.
Either way, this only tells us one thing.
$34,000 in 1917 dollars was a CRAP LOAD OF MONEY.
It's no wonder Sears ran that photo in their Modern homes catalogs -- the photo was in them from 1920 to 1926 at least. Since we know the houses were built with Sears materials, this must have been an absolutely massive sale for them.
So now I'm going to wind down this long blog post. I learned so, so much about my hometown during this little stint, so expect to see another G.W. Nicholas-related blog post soon. Another shout out to my Sears research partner in crime, Cindy. Without her help, none of this would have been possible!
Any questions? Feel free to email me at MidwestSearsHouses@gmail.com.
So when Cindy and I first met last fall, she gave me a re-printed 1926 Sears Modern Homes catalog. I was just getting started with searching for Sears kit homes, and she said that most of the ones in Dayton would most likely be found in this catalog. As I excitedly looked through the pages, I came across this image.
 |
| Image from 1925 Sears Modern Homes catalog, same photo as 1926 catalog |
Imagine my surprise when I found my own hometown mentioned in the very first photos of the catalog! If you take a closer look, you notice... these are NOT Sears kit houses. None of them match any models that Sears was producing at the time. I asked Cindy about it later and she told me that while the builder may have not used Sears building plans, he probably did use Sears materials to build the homes. Ahhh, okay, makes sense. I asked her if she had ever found this street of houses, she said that she had been looking for a while but hadn't ever come across it.
Well, Dayton did go through a bit of a transformation during parts of the 20th century. The first big transformation was the 1913 flood. This event still ranks as Ohio's worst natural disaster of all time, with over 467 deaths, mostly in the Miami Valley region. From the Dayton Daily News website: "The storm began with 58 mph wind gusts on March 21st, 1913. Two days later, Easter Sunday, the rain began dumping 8 to 11 inches over a five day period. Another two days later, with the Great Miami River rising nearly two feet an hour, the levees failed. (...) The amount of water that passed through the river channel in Dayton equaled the amount of water that flows over Niagara Falls in a four-day period." This massive flood transformed Dayton over time, with the city rebuilding, but never quite forgetting.
After the flood, in the years 1915-1929, Dayton hit its stride with the Golden Age of Growth. Also known as "the land of a thousand factories," the city population hits an all time high of 152,600 in 1920. By 1940, that number had exploded to nearly 211,000. With that, came a lot of home building - we have found that kit homes were popular in Dayton, especially Sears kit homes since Norwood Door & Sash was located just south of us, in the city of Norwood, which was an enclave of Cincinnati.
In the 1950's, and 60's, the population of the city is at its peak at 262,332. Modern freeways were being built through the heart of Downtown Dayton to account for local traffic and travelers. Entire parts of neighborhoods were wiped out by building I-75 and US-35. City officials called it "a period of major planning activity," but most residents called it "growing pains." After this, many residents of Dayton left for the suburbs for various reasons. In my opinion, I think Dayton is still recovering from that time period.
Just to give you an idea of how crazy it got, Dayton's population today is 140,500. The city is slowly coming back to glory, but it does take time.
If you need a tl;dr of that little section, here it is: 1913 flood destroyed city, city flourished after rebuilding, then got destroyed again when major highway system was build in 1950's and 60's, a lot of residents mass exodus to the suburbs.
Okay, now that we have a little bit of history of Dayton, lets get back to Sears homes.
So now that we know Dayton had some very transformative periods, there was about a 30% chance that the street of Sears houses had been destroyed over time. BUT even with that knowledge, I still had been searching. It had been eluding me until early last week.
I give you North Ardmore Ave, Dayton, OH.
 | ||
| Photo taken by Marie Vore, may not be used without permission |
So you're probably going "what in the world, there is no way that is the street!" You probably noticed the obvious missing houses in the picture I took, the overgrown weeds, the boarded up parts.... yeah. It was pretty sad to see. Hopefully we can see some re-investment in the area soon enough.
The way I found this street was by looking at the porch roofs and the second/third floor dormers of each house.
First house in the photo -- it's got that little bumpout on the porch roof.
Second house -- noticeably missing, get to that in a second.
Third house -- Porch roof matches, third floor dormer matches.
Fourth house -- also missing.
Fifth house -- hard to see, but it's a two story with a big shed dormer for the second floor.
Sixth house -- still being built.
Addresses for these homes range from 105 N Ardmore Ave to 127 N Ardmore Ave.
After digging around on the auditor website, the second house was knocked down sometime after 2011. Below is a photo before it met it's demise. It's a match!
 |
| Montgomery County auditor website photo - 109 N Ardmore Ave |
The fourth house had met its fate way before the Montgomery County auditor website was online, which was circa 1998. But with four of the five houses matching, it's certain that I have found the street.
Here's the cincher -- in the 1922 Sears Modern Homes catalog, they ran a clearer photo of the street than in the later editions.
 |
| from 1922 Sears Modern Homes catalog |
So now, you can clearly see the fifth and sixth house. The fifth house has a second story shed dormer, the sixth house has a very noticeable roofline up top.
Here are those houses on Google maps today -- rooflines match! When I found this little tidbit originally, I was flippin' out! We're talking like messaging Cindy "OMG!!!! I FOUND THE STREET!!!" multiple times.
 |
| Photo from Google Maps of 123 N Ardmore and 127 N Ardmore, Dayton, OH. |
So after we both calmed down, Cindy got down to researching North Ardmore Street to find some answers.
Before we get started, let me show you the area that the ads are talking about. Here's a map of what the area looks like now. From Cindy's research, we found that G.W. Nicholas bought plots of land in this area and had them developed -- other ads mention Anna St. later on, so he must've built the homes on North Ardmore and Second St before anything else. The red dots are the 6 houses I mentioned above, the blue lines are the other houses mentioned in the ads below, which means some of them were also built with Sears materials.
 |
| Google map of the area |
 |
| Feb 2nd, 1917 - Dayton Herald |
And here is where we first come across G.W. Nicholas. We did a LOT of research on him, enough for another forthcoming blogpost, but he is pretty much responsible for about a third of the development of the west side in Dayton. This was one of his very first plats that we found.
 |
| June 19th, 1917 - Dayton Herald |
Above, there's another ad in June of 1917. He's added on some more houses! In the first ad, it said it cost $2,000 to build each house. In this ad, it says Nicholas is selling them for $3,150. Not too shabby.
 |
| August 15th, 1917 - Dayton Daily News |
Here's where it gets interesting. Not a lot of people today might know the timeline of what was going on during this period. On April 6th, 1917, the US entered World War I. So in this ad, Mr. Nicholas seems a bit more desperate to offload his houses. It's been six months since they've been advertised, and clearly he's hit a wall (the words "real bargain" strike a chord) with selling them.
 |
| September 17th, 1917 - Dayton Daily News |
Here's the last ad that we see for this particular group of houses - he's offering quite the deal. He says in the ad, "the reason I can offer this low price is that I bought all materials at prices prevailing last year and in large quantity." From the first ad, we can see that he spent $34,000 overall to build them.
I ran the numbers through two inflation calculators -- honestly, I did the second one because I couldn't believe the first one. So according to the inflation calculator at in2013dollars.com, $34,000 equaled out to be around $661,300.
At the inflation calculator at Savings.com, it equaled out to be around $722,570.
Either way, this only tells us one thing.
$34,000 in 1917 dollars was a CRAP LOAD OF MONEY.
It's no wonder Sears ran that photo in their Modern homes catalogs -- the photo was in them from 1920 to 1926 at least. Since we know the houses were built with Sears materials, this must have been an absolutely massive sale for them.
So now I'm going to wind down this long blog post. I learned so, so much about my hometown during this little stint, so expect to see another G.W. Nicholas-related blog post soon. Another shout out to my Sears research partner in crime, Cindy. Without her help, none of this would have been possible!
Any questions? Feel free to email me at MidwestSearsHouses@gmail.com.
Very nicely done. The builder made quite an investment in that area!
ReplyDeleteThank you for posting such a great blog. I found your website perfect for my needs. Read About Windows Replacement in Worthington
ReplyDeleteMay I humbly submit that describing the street as being in a "terrible part of town" might be more gently stated as "part of town that could use some love" or investment or some other non-judgmental phrase? The people who live on that street are not themselves terrible and are likely just as dismayed at the condition of the homes around them as you were.
ReplyDeleteUpdated. Thanks for your comment! It's been a few years since I've written this blog post and now I realize how judgmental it sounded before.
DeleteIt's part of how we commonly talk about cities, sadly. Fascinating post!
DeleteTHIS IS TOTALLY AWESOME!!!
ReplyDelete