In the early 1900s it was possible to purchase an entire house by mail order. George F. Barber of Knoxville, Tennessee, began offering such houses in 1886. Montgomery Ward; the Radford Company of Chicago; Aladdin Readi-Cut Homes of Bay City, Michigan; the Farrar Company of Dalton, Georgia; and the R. L. Kenyon Company of Waukesha, Wisconsin, soon followed suit.

Perhaps the largest seller of houses by catalogue was Sears, Roebuck and Company, which first included a "Modern Homes" section in its spring 1908 catalogue. Later that year the firm put out its first Honorbilt Modern Homes catalogue, 44 pages and featuring 22 models, ranging from a three-room cottage for $650 to a nine-room Queen Anne-style for $2,500. The longest homes catalogue, 146 pages, appeared in 1918. The cheaper houses were identified by order numbers, the more expensive ones by names such as the Warrenton, the Windmere, the Whitehall, the Magnolia, the...