By Ed Shannon, Tales from Exit 22

Several weeks ago I became involved with the topic of people buying &8220;kit homes&8221; from the famous Sears, Roebuck & Co. catalog firm. Since that time I have acquired more information about this aspect of home construction, plus the location of several homes in this area that reportedly originated in a factory somewhere else and were shipped to Freeborn County in railroad boxcars sometime between 1908 and maybe the 1970s.

One of the homes is in a rural area, and I hope to check it out sometime in the near future. However, it&8217;s on private property and may be unoccupied. If this is the situation, then I&8217;ll just pass on this particular place.

Since my columns were published in the Jan. 25 and Feb. 1 issues of the Tribune, I have been given the locations of three more Sears homes in Albert Lea. Two of these homes are on the city&8217;s north side. Yet, they aren&8217;t the two homes the late Bidney Bergie and I tried to check on about 20 years ago. Anyway, I&8217;m in the process of doing further research on this topic with the owner of one of these homes.

There&8217;s a third home on the city&8217;s south side that was originally reported as being a Sears home. In a follow-up telephone conversation and an e-mail message, I have been informed that this particular home actually came from the Aladdin Co. of Bay City, Mich. As I mentioned in one of my previous columns, not all these &8220;do-it-yourself&8221; homes came from Sears. Some originated with Montgomery Ward, and over 75,000 came from the Aladdin firm.

Hopefully, I&8217;ll be able to make contact with the present owner of this particular home. Let&8217;s just see what evolves.

The Aladdin firm started selling their ready-to-assemble homes in 1906. That&8217;s two years earlier than Sears Roebuck. This firm continued on with their home sales until 1981, and this is 41 years longer than Sears.

One detail I haven&8217;t yet mentioned about both Sears and Aladdin is the fact they also sold other ready-to-build buildings. These included cottages, garages, smaller farm buildings, commercial structures and even military housing.

There&8217;s a Minnesota connection with the last category. On April 26, 1917, the Aladdin firm was asked by the U.S. Army to build temporary housing for 9,000 troops at Fort Snelling. Aladdin quickly modified several farm building plans and built the barracks and mess halls in 26 days.

This firm also built several Civilian Conservation Corps camps in the early 1930s and quite a number of military barracks and dormitories and homes for defense plant workers during World War II.

As I mentioned in my column on Feb. 1, when Sears closed its home sales division in 1940, all sales records were destroyed. As a result, a lot of information about their homes and where they went was lost.

The situation regarding Aladdin is different. As I&8217;ve already mentioned, this firm ceased operations in 1981. All the Aladdin sales records were preserved and in 1996, donated to the Clarke Historical Library at Central Michigan University in Mount Pleasant.

Just for the

heck of it, I called this library to follow

up on a logical hunch. I was wondering if their archives were based in part on where the Aladdin homes went. To be more specific, did they have a listing by city and state? Maybe there&8217;s more than one Aladdin home or other farm building in Albert Lea or Freeborn County.

The answer I was given was that the firm&8217;s old records were based strictly on the name of the purchaser. Thus, if there are any more Aladdin homes or other buildings in Albert Lea, nearby towns or farms, then it&8217;s up to the Tribune&8217;s readers to supply the needed information.

Let&8217;s expand on that last point, If anyone has a shed, lakeside cottage, hunting cabin, garage or other building that originated in kit form from somewhere else, let me know.

Ed Shannon&8217;s column has been appearing in the Tribune every Friday since December 1984.