Kaplan family living in a 100-year-old Sears built home

KAPLAN - From 1908 to 1940, Sears, Roebuck, and Co. sold approximately 100,000 precut homes, known as the Sears Modern Home.

Today, here in Kaplan, a Sears Modern Home still stands, as sturdy as the day it was built.

Henri and Carol Ann (Mrs. C.A.) Deshotels’ home, located on the corner of Church and Third Street, was ordered from a Sears’ catalog by the A. H. Romaine family of Kaplan, over 100 years ago.

This new method of homebuilding, dubbed Modern Homes, revolutionized the way American’s became homeowners and was a forerunner to today’s prefab homes.

The made to order Sears homes featured over 400 different designs, home prices ranged from $900 to $5,000. Anyone within two miles of railroad could purchase one of these homes through a Sears’ mail order catalog. The shipment would arrive with all materials necessary to quickly assemble the home – from precut and numbered lumber straight down to the nails, paint and hardware.

All fixtures, appliances, furniture and special features could also easily be selected from the Sears catalog.

With the homes’ low cost and labor saving construction, the only reason Sears’ line of Modern Homes went out of business was because they suffered their own financial mortgage crisis during the Great Depression.

According to the Deshotels’, the house was purchased from Sears, including the windows, doors, dining room plate rails, claw foot tubs, lavatories, and stained glass work.

Originally located on the A. H. Romaine’s tree lined lot, on Romaine Road, the house was purchased from the Romaines by Dan Fietel of Crowley, for his niece Mrs. Solomon Gross.

Sol Gross was an early Kaplan merchant whose mercantile business was incidentally located in the same building that now houses the Kaplan Herald.

Around the year 1915 Mr. Gross made plans to relocate the home to its current location. Moved by mules and a Windlass pulley, it reportedly took approximately two months for the house to make the two-mile journey, taking two weeks to cross the railroad track. The Gross family modernized the home, adding pluming , electricity and raising the cellar to an above ground basement in order to accommodate and keep dry its coal burning furnace. The house was later purchased by the Latour family.

Former Mayor A. G.Latour, his wife, eight children, a grandmother, and a house servant once held residence in this Sears house.

Over 36 years ago, the Deshotels purchased the home from Dr. Thomas G. Latour, one of the Latour sons. It was while doing some routine renovations that the Deshotels found irrevocable evidence of the house’s origins – a label showing the shipment from the Sears millwork factory in Norwood, Ohio. The label was complete with an invoice number, the destination of Kaplan, the name of the person being shipped to (Romaine & Sons), and even a note for Alice Plantation to be notified of the shipments arrival.

The Deshotels also discovered carbide gas pipes within the ceiling joists, which was originally used to light fixtures including a Tiffany chandelier in the dining room .

Today, the house stands as a five bedroom and three-and-a-half bath consisting of approximately 5,000 square feet of living area, and around 3,000 square feet in the above ground basement.

Every inch of the home is beautifully decorated in keeping with the original style.

Henri, O.H. Deshotels, III and his wife, C.A. Deshotels, met while attending college at Louisiana Tech University. The couple will celebrate their 42nd wedding anniversary this November.

Henri Deshotels is a 1968 graduate of Loyola University School of Law, and maintains a law practice in Kaplan. Mrs. C.A.(as she is known) is a retired teacher, with over 27 years of experience, and remains active in the community through her involvement with Chez Elles, Le Musee du Kaplan and in the past, Chic-a-la-Pie.

The Deshotels have two daughters, Aimee Kane of Monroe, LA and Natalie Montgomery, and one grandson Thomas Montgomery of Lafayette, LA.