"The invention of the horse-drawn streetcar in 1853, followed by the electric streetcar in 1888, meant that middle-class families could now expand outwards into the first generation of suburbs, the streetcar suburbs.<p>Enter the kit house: a home you could order from a catalog, and have shipped via rail to your building site. Before kit houses, many homes were built from pattern books: collections of house plans with blueprints for skilled contractors and carpenters to follow.<p>The kit house, a product of mass-production took the pattern-book concept even further. For each kit house, every piece of lumber, siding, doors, windows, columns, etc. were produced to exact precision in a factory, numbered for easy assembly, and sent to the site by rail and delivered to the lot via cart or truck."