Eaton's Catalogue Houses

© 2008, Christian Cassidy

1913 Eaton's catalogue (Museum of Civilization)

The Timothy Eaton Company is legendary for selling everything an urban dweller or rural settler needed to outfit their home - including the house itself !

Eatons sold houses, (and barns, and churches, and schools), from their catalogue in the early 1900s to meet the needs of families settling Western Canada. It was also an easy way for a developer or railway company to instantly create a town site. Instead of years of planning, development and construction, one could pop out of the soil within a matter of weeks with the help of a small team of labourers.

The Canadian Museum of Civilization has a section on their website dedicated to the 'mail order home'. 

One interesting passage I found there was:  "...after the First World War,  Eaton’s Catalogue offered a complete farm – everything but the horses – to returning veterans taking up land offered in the prairie provinces. No assembly instructions for these houses, barns, and milk-sheds or pig pens has yet been dug up."The Winnipeg Architecture Foundation has an undated copy of the "Eaton Plan Book of Ideal Homes" at their website if you'd like to check out the many different styles that were on offer. It also goes into detail about where they are milled and what other items, from bathtubs to furnaces, that you could order along with them.

It is impossible to tell how many Eatons homes and other buildings were built and how many are left standing.  This is further complicated by the fact that there were a number of companies that sold prefabricated houses in the early part of the last century, some of which are mistaken for Eatons homes, (see below). 

What got me interested in this subject was what some THOUGHT was an Eatons house in Rivers, Manitoba that was being renovated in 2008 -2009.

It turns out that this is a bank building from the catalogue of B.C. Mills Timber and Trading Company. Like Eaton's, you could order an array of buildings from their catalogue and the package would be shipped from their mill in British Columbia to the rail station nearest you.

You can read more about the Rivers home and B. C. Mills' prefabricated buildings here and here.

UPDATE: There is a book and video series called Catalogue Houses: Eaton's and Others. You can read more by the author here and see the videos here.