Eaton Homes A Piece Of Prairie HIstory

There was a time when the Eaton’s catalogue could deliver a lot more than a new dress, a Christmas toy or something needed around the farm. You could order your house.

For families settling across Western Canada in the early 1900s, the Eaton’s catalogue was a familiar sight in many homes. Often called the “Homesteader’s Bible,” it gave rural families access to goods that otherwise meant a long trip to a larger centre. By the 1910s, the list of things available by mail had grown to include the materials needed to build an entire house.

From about 1910 until 1932, the T. Eaton Co. offered catalogue houses to customers in Western Canada through its Winnipeg catalogue and special home plan books. There were at least 40 different designs to choose from, ranging from modest prairie homes to much larger houses.

It is hard to imagine today.

A family could sit down with a catalogue, look through the different designs, choose the house that suited them and place an order. Then they waited for their house to arrive at the railway station. The lumber was shipped from British Columbia, while doors, windows and other materials came through Winnipeg. Depending on the package ordered, materials could include flooring, shingles, mouldings, hardware, paint, nails and building paper. Plumbing and heating could also be added at an additional cost. Unlike some kit homes of the era, Eaton’s lumber was not pre-cut and numbered for easy assembly. Once everything arrived by rail, the purchaser still had the considerable job of hauling the materials from the station to the building site. From there, local carpenters were often hired to turn that boxcar full of lumber and supplies into a family home.

For prairie families, the idea made sense. Communities were growing quickly, lumber was not readily available across much of the open Prairies, and the railway already connected small towns and rural areas to larger centres. Eaton’s found a way to use that network to bring almost everything needed for a new home directly to the people who needed it.

And these weren’t all tiny houses. One of the better-known Eaton’s designs was the Earlsfield, a one-and-a-half-storey home that first appeared as Plan 68 in 1912. At the time, the house package was listed for about $696.50. Indoor plumbing could be added for another $150, while hot-air heating was an additional expense.

Later catalogues gave many of the house names beginning with “Ea,” including the Eatoncourt, Eastbourne, Easton, Eager, Earlswood and Earlscourt. For those of us used to clicking “add to cart” and watching a package travel to our doorstep, the idea of mail order isn’t particularly unusual. But ordering the doorstep itself is another story.

More than a century later, some of those catalogue houses are still standing across the Prairies. They have been renovated, added onto and passed from one family to another, and in some cases the people living inside may not even realize their home once appeared on the pages of an Eaton’s catalogue. There could very well be an old farmhouse or familiar home along a street that began with someone turning the pages of the Eaton’s catalogue, choosing a floor plan and placing an order. Then, sometime later, a train pulled into the local station carrying their new house.