Frank Boles
On March 4, 2021, Andrew and Wendy Mutch spoke about Aladdin kit homes.
Aladdin began selling kit homes in 1906. The idea was simple: a person could find the home of their dreams in a catalog and buy everything they needed to build their home from one source. Everything from the floor to the roof, including the paint to use in between, was packaged together in one giant kit. Aladdin would ship all this building material via railroad. The purchaser would pick it all up at the nearest train station, haul it to the construction site, and assemble the house – a home that could be built in a day, as the company optimistically promised in its advertising.
Andrew and Wendy reviewed the company’s history, how its homes were built, and how a person could go about researching if the house they lived in is an Aladdin kit home. They also noted that there were several kit home manufacturers in the United States during this period, and many of them sold almost identical houses. This was particularly the case in Michigan where Bay City was the home to three separate companies that sold kit homes: Aladdin, Lewis, and Sterling. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, each of these firms very much flattered the other.
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| An Aladdin home and its floor plan as seen in their catalog |
You may think that a home created from a kit more than a century ago, by individuals who had little or no training in construction, would not stand the test of time. But as Andrew and Wendy showed, they have found many Aladdin homes still standing throughout Michigan. Some are a bit battered, but others have been beautifully restored and look as if they were plucked off the pages of a 1920s Aladdin catalog. In other cases, the Mutches captured photographs of an Aladdin home before it was razed to make way for new construction.
The presentation can be viewed on the CMU video sharing website chipcast.
The Clarke Historical Library has a special relationship to Aladdin Homes. The company’s papers, including over 60,000 individual sales records are housed in the library. To find out more about the papers themselves, see the Clarke’s description of the Aladdin Company Records. You can also find many of the company’s catalogs online at the Clarke’s website.