WESTFIELD — Westfield, whose catalog of historic homes spans more than two centuries worth of growth and expansion, has always been something of an architectural chameleon. A walk through town yields everything from Revolutionary War-era farmsteads, generational Dutch Colonials and stately manor homes to art deco concept homes and modern construction. Now, despite the community’s longstanding history of stylistic diversity, some residents worry that overdevelopment and rapid change could alter the local landscape beyond recognition.

According to author Janet Foster, who gave a presentation entitled “Suburban Homes of the Early 20th Century,” at the town hall last week, Westfield residents across multiple generations have expressed very similar sentiments and concerns in the past.

The presentation, hosted by the Westfield Historic Preservation Commission, drew a crowd of about 65 people.

“When you talk about community growth, you have to remember that at some point in history, somebody probably grumbled about the same houses that you now think of as an essential part of your neighborhood,” said Ms. Foster, who works as an adjunct professor at Columbia University.

One of the most broad examples of that phenomenon, Ms. Foster said, occurred during the early 1900s with the advent of catalog homes.

At the time, she said, companies like Sears and Roebuck (whose annual mail-order catalogs served as a precursor to modern-day home-delivery services like Amazon) offered economical home construction kits that would enable middle-class workers to purchase their own homes. The kits, which were typically shipped by rail and assembled on site, represented one of America’s earliest attempts to create realistic affordablehousing opportunities in rural communities like Westfield.

Since zoning regulations were still predominately non-existent during the early 20th century, many of these kits were assembled by the homeowners themselves with the help of friends, neighbors and relatives. Other homeowners relied on local carpenters or contractors to complete their installations.

By 1918, Ms. Foster said, people were able to purchase a complete Sears home kit — which included lumber, hardware, plumbing, lighting, paint, millwork, heating, eaves, downspouts, paper and roofing, and even wall paper — for about $1,600. Other catalog publishers, likeAladdin Homes, offered similar deals.

“The hope was that once people built their homes, they would go back to their catalogs and buy everything else that they would need to fill them — furniture, clothes, kitchenware, etc.,” she said.

Catalog kit houses, several examples of which still exist in and around the Westfield community today, continued to grow in popularity until the late 1920s.

“All throughout the Depression, Sears offered credit to everybody for everything. That’s great if you’re buying farm equipment or furniture, but kit houses were more of an investment. When people couldn’t pay, they defaulted on their loans,” Ms. Foster explained, adding that the company quickly fell into financial trouble shortly after the stock market crash of 1929. “These were not like modernday mortgages. People owned their properties outright, which meant that Sears had no recourse and no way to collect on those debts.”

Debt-collection challenges were compounded, Ms. Foster said, by the fact that Sears did not actually sell built-out homes. In other words, she said, there was nothing to repossess.

“Sears sold boxes of lumber and paint and wallpaper. It’s not like they could show up with a truck and cart these houses away,” she said.

Sears ultimately discontinued its Modern Homes catalog around 1940. Many other catalog services eventually followed suit. Had these companies been able to continue to deliver their kits after the end of World War II, Ms. Foster said, modern suburban communities might look vastly different.

According to information provided by Sears, the company never kept a running record of where their kits were sent or where the homes were ultimately built. As a result, it can be difficult to properly identify these homes today without extensive property records and research.

Ms. Foster’s presentation also traversed the history of planned communities (like corporate Levittowns), pre-fabricated construction and tract housing.

“Suburban areas are a constant work in progress,” she said. ‘’That’s what makes them so completely fascinating.”