
The Mail Order American Dream: An Introductory Guide to Identifying Kit Houses - spenrose
http://mcmansionhell.com/post/155602312686/the-mail-order-american-dream-an-introductory
======
spenrose
"The invention of the horse-drawn streetcar in 1853, followed by the electric
streetcar in 1888, meant that middle-class families could now expand outwards
into the first generation of suburbs, the streetcar suburbs.

Enter the kit house: a home you could order from a catalog, and have shipped
via rail to your building site. Before kit houses, many homes were built from
pattern books: collections of house plans with blueprints for skilled
contractors and carpenters to follow.

The kit house, a product of mass-production took the pattern-book concept even
further. For each kit house, every piece of lumber, siding, doors, windows,
columns, etc. were produced to exact precision in a factory, numbered for easy
assembly, and sent to the site by rail and delivered to the lot via cart or
truck."

