History of the Manufactured House

Manufactured homes are those that are either built wholly in a factory or shipped piecemeal to a site and erected there. RVs of all types, mobile homes and modular homes are also called manufactured homes because they fall into the first category. 

The very first manufactured home was shipped from England to the U.S. in 1764. The English, ever on the go and loving something different or quirky, built customized vans in the first part of the 20th century. This is also when an American designed the fifth wheel, which is a style of travel trailer still in heavy use today. 

 Mobile homes started coming off the assembly line in New York , during the mid 1920s and were mostly used for going on vacation. In the thirties, campgrounds and other locations where travelers could park their RVs sprouted up. The U.S. government bought a whole lot of manufactured homes for workers during WWII, so they could live near factories involved in the war effort.

During the second half of the 1940s decade, trailers were longer than thirty feet and even sported a small bathroom. People sometimes lived in them fulltime and made gardens and other permanent structures like fences, to enclose them. Mobile homes were split in two by the 1960s, as they got larger and larger. A building code was needed, and the MHCG (mobile home craftsmen guild) devised one. These manufactured homes became very popular in the 1970s. One in three homes were made in a factory.

Manufactured homes have to be made to stringent standards these days. They can be tiny, such as a trailer pulled by a motorcycle or mansion-sized with several flat screen TVs, a king-sized bed, luxurious decor, a fireplace, granite countertops and large bathrooms. And that's only the RVs.  Modular and manufactured homes that look like regular houses and are meant to be stationary and have become those veritable mansions. Still, along with the explosion in size for manufactured homes, there are some that have been downsized.

Concerns over the environment have led some manufacturers to build log cabins on wheels that are only a hundred square feet. They are also off the grid, because they use solar power for all of their energy needs. And talk about recycling - apartments are being made from shipping containers, often stacked on top of each other, or side by side, to create the ultimate in indestructible and practical manufactured homes.