Hard, cold facts

For better or worse, air conditioning changed the way Southerners live

A dogtrot house, with a middle passageway, was designed to keep its occupants as cool as possible during hot days before electric fans and air conditioning. The house in this undated photograph was a few miles from Calico Rock.

A dogtrot house, with a middle passageway, was designed to keep its occupants as cool as possible during hot days before electric fans and air conditioning. The house in this undated photograph was a few miles from Calico Rock.

Sunday, August 31, 2014

Nothing has had a greater impact on modern Arkansas and the South than air conditioning. As historian Raymond Arsenault wrote: "Air conditioning has changed the Southern way of life, influencing everything from architecture to sleeping habits.''

The air conditioner has greatly accelerated what journalist John Egerton called the Americanization of Dixie. ''General Electric has proved a more devastating invader than General William Tecumseh Sherman," Arsenault concluded.

Modern Arkansans take air conditioning for granted. The vast majority of our homes are air-conditioned; our work places are, for the most part, cool. Our children attend air-conditioned schools and our elderly play checkers in nursing homes that stay at a blissful 72 degrees.

The only things that sweat in our modern restaurants are glasses of iced tea.

Before the 1960s Arkansans suffered through broiling summer months. Only those who lived through it can fully appreciate the discomfort of the pre-air-conditioned South.

"I was born in a house with a tin roof, no electricity,"says Bill Kramer of North Little Rock. "The only fans were the [paper] funeral home kind."

Joe Wasson of Fort Smith said, "We got air conditioning in our house in 1963 as did most of our neighbors in the new housing development on North 52nd in Fort Smith. I don't think any of the parents had ever lived in an air-conditioned house before because during the summer of 1963, the race was on to see who could get their house the coldest.

"Every kid in the neighborhood had colds and sniffles all summer from leaving their 61-degree house and stepping into the 90-something-degree outdoor weather to play.

"By the next summer the parents figured out only the electric company wins when your thermostat is turned all the way down."

Having grown up in rural western Arkansas in the 1950s and '60s, I have vivid memories of enduring torrid summers. Nights could be blistering, made worse by assertive humidity that turned bed sheets into clinging shrouds. Fans, especially large "attic fans" that pulled air through the house, could mitigate the discomfort a bit.

For our 19th-century ancestors, the heat and humidity were made worse by clothing. Men and women were covered in layers of clothes with long sleeves and buttoned collars; women wore dresses that dragged the ground. Civil War correspondence documents the horrors of marching in summer heat, then going into battle with sweat-drenched clothing.

Heat's horrors continued unabated. On July 6, 1943, Ruth Thomas, a North Little Rock resident and author of the "Country Diarist" column in the Arkansas Gazette, wrote in a letter: "Today the thermometer on our north porch read 106. Hot winds blew, and I closed doors and lowered shades. The house was dark, and airless, beyond the windows no sound. All life, I thought, must be drained of will and purpose, reduced to futile breathing."

Businesses were keenly aware of heat waves and advertised a variety of ways to beat it. "Iced Watermelons, Arkansas' Finest Grown Melons -- Red, Ripe and Juicy" were advertised by City Delivery Co. in Little Rock on July 29, 1926. During an early heat wave in June 1924, Back's Department Store had a "Keep Cool" sale, with seersucker suits at $9.95 -- "there's nothing cooler," an ad boasted.

The electric fan was invented in 1882 and caught on quickly. "By the end of the century," Arsenault wrote, "ornate brass-fitted ceiling fans graced the lobbies of many Southern hotels, while smaller 'rocking chair' fans could be found in parlors from Alexandria to San Antonio."

Most rural Arkansans could not afford a fan, and most did not have electrical service anyhow. During the 1902 gubernatorial campaign, Gov. Jeff Davis was criticized for using tax funds to buy "a whirligig fan ... to fan himself with, not being content to use a palm leaf like ordinary people."

By 1926, when most larger towns were electrified, Little Rock's newspaper readers were tempted by ads for a variety of electric fans. One hardware store offered an 8-inch "Eskimo" fan for $3.99, which could be shipped and insured for 15 cents.

Though it would ultimately be a Yankee -- a Cornell University-educated engineer -- who would patent a workable air conditioner, it was a Florida physician in the 1830s who initiated experiments with a primitive form of mechanical cooling. Dr. John Gorrie was attempting to lower the body temperatures of patients who had yellow fever and malaria. Ultimately, his work led to the invention of mechanical ice manufacturing, which got him hailed in 1914 as "the inventor of air conditioning" and his statue placed in Statuary Hall in Washington.

Willis Haviland Carrier, a 25-year-old engineer from New York, was the first to design and implement an air conditioning system that controlled temperature and humidity. Arsenault described Carrier's technology as involving "pumping air at a set velocity over coils refrigerated at a set temperature." In 1902 the first air conditioning system was installed at a printing plant in Brooklyn.

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While air conditioning got its start in the North, much of its growth was in the South.

Many of the early devices were designed for textile mills and tobacco warehouses in the Carolinas. By 1908, several cotton mills were air-conditioned.

The Magnolia Cotton Mill in Columbia County installed air conditioning soon after its construction in 1927.

It didn't take long to become clear that much money might be made in cooling people. A major expansion of air conditioning was made possible in 1922 when Carrier replaced the piston-driven compressor with a more efficient centrifugal compressor. The early units were often taller than a man.

"It was through the movie house that air conditioning entered the mainstream of Southern life," Arsenault wrote. In 1924 three theaters in Texas -- the Palace in Dallas and the Texan and Iris in Houston -- became the first Southern movie houses to be air-conditioned.

Identifying the first theater in Arkansas to install actual air conditioning has proved difficult. Movie houses had a reputation for being cooler than most buildings due to powerful ventilation systems. When the Concord movie theater opened in Springdale in 1927, advertisements boasted of a "typhoon cooling system" located on the roof and operated by a variable speed motor. "When the motor is in operation it forces a constant circulation of fresh air to all parts of the building, making the room pleasant on the hottest day," the ad promised.

The Majestic Theater in Little Rock had some sort of cooling system by July 1926, when it advertised itself as "the coolest spot in town."

Within two years, the Majestic definitely had an air conditioning system.

On the first day of July 1928, the theater ran a large advertisement in the Arkansas Gazette for the "screen picturization" titled No Other Woman starring Dolores Del Rio, and boasting of "refrigerated air to keep you in solid comfort."

Both houses of the U.S. Congress were air-conditioned by 1929 -- which resulted in longer sessions. One Massachusetts representative commented that "the members were no longer in such a hurry to flee Washington in July. The Southerners especially had no place else to go that was half as comfortable."

The invention of freon, a safer and cheaper refrigerant, in 1931 greatly expanded air conditioning in commercial settings such as department stores.

Arkansans quickly got used to shopping in air-conditioned shops. The Gus Blass Department Store in downtown Little Rock was retrofitted with air conditioning in 1936, believed to be a first in the state. Four years later, M.M. Cohn Co. opened its 75,000-square-foot flagship store on Little Rock's Main Street, which was resplendent with "complete inside air conditioning."

But after a day of shopping or going to the movies, Arkansans had to return to hot and humid homes. A number of home air conditioners were introduced throughout the 1930s, but none really caught on -- probably due to the dire economic times.

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As early as 1943, Arkansas Western Gas Co. was offering "house air conditioning that makes your home as cool as the mountains in summer."

Based on limited research, the earliest instance I could find of a house being built in Arkansas with central air conditioning was that of Andrew Florida in Blytheville in 1931.

Not long after World War II ended, contractors began building whole communities of houses with central air conditioning.

Still, as late as 1950, home service accounted for a mere 5 percent of the air conditioning business in this state. Things changed in 1951 when an inexpensive window unit came on the market. By 1960, almost 15 percent of Arkansas homes had at least partial air conditioning.

In 1953, Little Rock developer E.L. Fausett built the first subdivision in which every house had central cooling, the Broadmoor neighborhood on South University Avenue.

In Arkansas the growing competition between the electrical and natural gas companies hastened the air conditioning of houses and businesses. Witt and Jack Stephens from Grant County had, with the considerable assistance of Gov. Orval Faubus, built the Arkansas-Louisiana Gas Co. into a formidable giant. Arkla, as it was known, aggressively promoted its natural gas-powered central air conditioning units. Advertisements boasted that "gas year round air conditioning wins all sorts of medals from owners," and that it was less expensive too.

Arkansas Power & Light Co. countered with its claim that "electricity does it better!" A "Reddy Plan" allowed homeowners to install central air conditioning immediately and pay for it through low-interest loans.

By the summer of 1962, Arkansans were buying air conditioning at twice the national rate -- with almost 35 percent of houses having "conditioned air." That number grew to 71.3 percent by 1980.

Today, 97 percent of Arkansas families live in air-conditioned abodes.

The air conditioner and the lifestyles it enables have had an amazing impact on Arkansas and the rest of the South. It helped kill traditional architecture as builders concentrated on tract houses with low ceilings, small or inoperable windows, and tiny decorative porches.

While the automobile took people from their homes, the air conditioner did the opposite, making it possible for family members to withdraw into what Arsenault called "air-cooled privatism."

Video games, cell phones and other entertainment technologies have completed our transformation into couch potatoes, a process accelerated by air conditioning.

And what has shutting ourselves inside cost us?

"Our house, in deep shade, open to the breezes on Mount Sequoyah, was often plenty warm at night when we farm types went to bed early," said Harriet Jansma of Fayetteville.

"But we feared that with air conditioning we would no longer enjoy all the benefits of open windows and outdoor life. So we built a treehouse for sleeping instead -- a large screened room high among the trees in the woods just east of our house.

"We've slept comfortably there seven months of the year for nearly 20 years and now don't worry if our cooking heats up the house in the evening. We go to sleep serenaded by the katydids, the frogs and the crickets, and awaken to the pre-dawn screeches of a barred owl."

Tom Dillard is a historian and former archivist who writes a weekly column for this newspaper. He lives in air-conditioned retirement in rural Hot Spring County and can be reached at

[email protected]

Style on 08/31/2014