Sears and Montgomery Ward sold some houses that were so similar it can be difficult to tell them apart without an interior inspection.

If a certain style was selling well for one company, the other rival would design their own version of the same house. This leads to all kinds of confusion today, when homeowners misidentify their houses as being from Sears and they are actually from Wards, and vice-versa.

Here's an example of Sears and Wards lookalike models.

The Salem from Montgomery Ward. Scan from Antique Home.

zc zc The Puritan from Sears. Do you see how these houses could be confused? (Sears had their design out first.)

Distinguishing Between Clones--A Deep Dive
Let's take a look at a local example in Barrington. This house
The first thing you might notice is that the catalog illustrations show that the houses are reversed. (The front door is on the right on the Sears version and on the left on the Wards version). That isn't meaningful to us because each company would flip the house layout if the customers requested it. So front door location doesn't help us to determine which house is which.

Another difference is the dormer shape over the second floor bedroom. As delivered, the Sears version had a shed dormer and the Wards version had a hipped dormer. However, that was customizable by the buyer and so there wan't a standard shape to that dormer from either company.

Another noticeable difference is the shape of the little window above the front door. Unfortunately, when windows are replaced, often that tapered window in the Sears version is switched to a less expensive rectangular window. As a result, today, the window shape cannot be used to make an identification.

So where does that leave us? How can we tell what company manufactured our yellow cottage?

Oral History
We could ask the homeowners. For decades, the house's owners have said it was a Sears