Workers' Housing: Home

Excerpt from Building A College: An Architectural History of Berea College[1]

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Worker's Housing:

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Sears Roebuck, as a mail order catalog, designed, sold and shipped by rail pre-fabricated houses across the United States. When the average household  income  was  about  $2,000 in 1933, Sears  Roebuck  sold  their  most  popular  four room model, the Crafton, for $3,400. From 1910 to the 1940s, an estimated 500,000 mail order houses were sold in the United States. Magazines illustrated New England farm houses  and American Colonial examples of new house design and construction  ( America )s Favorite  Homes Mail-Order Catalogues as a Guide to Popular Early 20th Century Houses, 1990; The Architectural Forum, April, 1933). Berea's housing construction aped this taste and these traditional designs  in many of the worker's houses.

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[1] Citation: Boyce, Robert Piper. Building A College: An Architectural History of Berea College. Self-published. Berea, Ky: Berea College Printing Services, 2006, p. 52.

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Boyce, Robert Piper. Building A College: An Architectural History of Berea College. Self-published. Berea, Ky: Berea College Printing Services, 2006, p34-36.