-Farm News photo by Darcy Dougherty Maulsby
Featured here is the Olson's living room.

DALLAS COUNTY — With the steady stream of traffic along U.S. Highway 169 north of Adel, it’s easy to miss a unique Dallas County farmhouse, although it’s simple to spot if you look for the Penoach Winery sign.

Stan and Joanie Olson’s distinctive, two-story home is located just to the east of their winery, which is housed in a clay-tile dairy barn built in the 1920s.

While the barn and house are surrounded by housing developments that began to take shape by the mid-1990s, the property was once the H.B. Kinnick farm. The elegant, white farmhouse was likely built around 1917, as best as the Olsons can tell.

“It was a Gordon-Van Tine kit house,” said Joanie Olson, who has run Penoach Winery with her husband since 2006. “Some of the wood is stamped with ‘H.B. Kinnick, Adel, Iowa, GVT, Davenport.’ The materials likely were shipped to Adel on the train.”

Sears, Roebuck and Company was well-known for offering pre-cut “houses by mail” in the early 20th century. The Gordon-Van Tine Co. (GVT) of Davenport, Iowa, which U.N. Roberts started in 1866 as a sawmill, began supplying materials for Sears’ homes by the early 1900s.

-Farm News photo by Darcy Dougherty Maulsby
Featured here is the Olson's dining room, which features many built-in cabinets, a window seat and plenty of storage.

When this relationship ended in 1912, Gordon-Van Tine began offering its own plan book filled with dozens of options for potential home buyers.

Plans featured the popular designs of the era, including Prairie-style homes, bungalows and foursquares, noted the Iowa Architectural Foundation’s (IAF) blog post “Gordon-Van Tine Homes: A New Way to Build the American Dream.”

By 1916, Gordon-Van Tine (which stayed in business until 1947) introduced its first line of ready-cut homes. Lumber was pre-cut to the proper length and labeled — ready to nail for easy assembly. Everything needed to construct a home was included in the kit, from hardware to paint.

“While materials such as lumber and hardware were standardized, plans were flexible,” the IAF noted. “Customers were encouraged to customize floor plans. Hundreds of options were available to make each home unique, including porches, built-in cabinets, trellises and cladding materials, to name a few. As a result, tens of thousands of kit homes were sold across the country — from rural areas to urban ones.”

In 1917, for example, a large, attractive, four-bedroom home from the Gordon-Van Tine Co. could be purchased for less than $2,000. More than 100,000 kit homes from companies like Sears and Gordon-Van Tine were built in the United States between 1908 and 1940, according to the IAF.

-Farm News photo by Darcy Dougherty Maulsby
The fireplace sets off this living area in the Olson family home.

Based on drawings in Gordon-Van Tine catalogs, it appears that the Olson’s home could be “The Glencoe,” which features shallow, hipped roof lines common to Prairie-style architecture. The style was advertised in 1916 as “A Most Beautiful Home, The Home of Mr. Roberts, President of Gordon-Van Tine.” Ads promoted this kit home for $1,260. (That’s roughly $34,000 in today’s dollars.)

The house played a small role in the 2022 documentary film “Kinnick,” which featured the life of University of Iowa football star Nile Kinnick. Kinnick’s cousin Don Bice lived in the house as a child and recalled the heartache of the Great Depression.

“I clearly remember 1936. I was 9 years old, sitting on those steps and bawling. I had my little coveralls on. We had lost the farm to the bank,” Bice said in the movie. “The auctioneer was out there, auctioning off all our belongings. He was just pounding the gravel, and saying ‘sold!’ And every time he’d say ‘sold!’ I’d sob again. Because there was my life … going across.”

-Submitted photo
This vintage photo show the Olson's farmhouse as it looked in its early years.

-Farm News photo by Darcy Dougherty Maulsby
Stan and Joanie Olson stand in front of the barn on their farm in 2016. Their Dallas County farm is located just north of Adel along U.S. Highway 169.

-Farm News photo by Darcy Dougherty Maulsby
This elegant, white farmhouse in Dallas County (above) was likely built around 1917, according to its current owners, Stan and Joanie Olson. “It was a Gordon-Van Tine kit house,” said Joanie Olson.