Throwing off the surly bonds of a Midwestern summer’s heat

Folks out on the Left Coast are sweltering this summer, with record high temps being set all the way up into Canada where triple-digit is—until recently at least—unheard of. And the problems is, of course, that most folks out and up that way have never bothered with installing air conditioning, because they’ve never really needed it.

Here in the Midwest, though, hot, humid summers with sultry nights are the rule rather than the exception, something that literally makes the tall corn grow around these parts.

Going way, way back into Kendall County’s prehistory, keeping cool was easy—the last Ice Age cooled everything off for several thousand years, burying History Central where I’m writing this under around 2,000 feet of ice. The main problem faced by what few area residents there were back then, in fact (besides fending off the passing saber-toothed tiger or the occasional dire wolf), was keeping warm, even in summer.

Summer heat wasn’t a problem for Kendall County’s ancient people–keeping from freezing during that era’s long Ice Age winters was.

But the climate did warm up during thousands of years and those skillful Native American hunters dealt with the dire wolves and saber-tooth cats, gradually added more gathering to their lifestyles, and eventually created tribal societies.

Later Kendall Countians, like the Pottawatomi Indians, kept cool in summer by removing clothing to maintain their comfort levels. Many American Indians wore nothing but their moccasins in summer, thoroughly offending the first Europeans who arrived who, because of existing morals and fashions, were wrapped, chin to toe, in woolens and linens year around.

Permanent settlement by White Americans didn’t start here in northern Illinois until the late 1820s. And as soon as those settlers arrived out here on the Illinois prairies, they encountered a challenging climate. Bitterly cold winter winds swept across the tallgrass prairies, sometimes dropping snow measured in feet, followed by oppressively hot, humid summer weather.

That meant housing that was just fine down South or in New England didn’t work very well here. New England houses were built to conserve heat during that region’s long winters, while Southern architecture was mostly aimed at trying to keep interiors livable during hot weather. Neither style was particularly good at doing both.

So gradually, designs began to include features that helped deal with both cold and hot weather, along with such refinements as window and door screens that would permit windows to be open during the summer months to encourage ventilation while keeping out insects and other pests. Tall ceilings allowed summer heat to rise away from those sitting at tables and on chairs, while double-hung windows featured movable upper sashes that could be opened to vent the hot air that collected up near the ceiling level.

The wide roof overhangs popular with long-ago architects were not stylistic affectations, either. They were both functional as well as decorative, keeping hot sun off the sides and gables of the houses, reducing solar gain in the summer.

My father’s boyhood home just south of Emporia, Kansas featured a porch that wrapped around the whole house, cooling all four walls.

The sun’s heat was also reduced in those homes by the sizeable porches favored by Victorians. Those porches also provided additional living area for the family in summer. The house my father grew up in just south of Emporia, Kansas, had a porch that wrapped completely around the structure, assuring that every room on the first floor was shaded from the sun’s rays.

When it got really hot, however, people in the 1800s did what we do today to cool off. Noted the Oswego correspondent of the Kendall County Record in the paper’s July 9, 1874 edition: “If those boys swimming under the bridge on Tuesday afternoon have no common decency, their parents should incorporate a little to them by the means of a switch. They took special pains when a lady and young girl were crossing the bridge to swim out and by various contortions indecently expose themselves.”

Back then, folks used all kinds of heat-beating measures. In church, the rhythmic movement of dozens of cardboard fans (usually advertising the local funeral home) in the congregants’ hands put many a youngster sound asleep on hot Sunday mornings.

This photo of a quartette of young ladies swimming was taken by Irvin Haines on the Fox River just above the old Parker mills and dam around 1900. (Little White School Museum collection)

Band concerts in the evening and picnics in the county’s cool groves and along the river got families out of their hot houses at other times. And there were those occasional dips in the river—with or without swimming costume.

And then as now, a frosty dish of cold ice cream could hold off the heat for awhile. Noted editor John R. Marshall in the July 22, 1875 Record: “Holland makes splendid chocolate ice cream, and if you want a real nice dish to cool you off, just drop into his [Yorkville] restaurant.”

Mechanical cooling of private homes was, however, not much more than a dream during the 19th and well into the 20th Century.

On the other hand, starting midway through the 19th Century, keeping food cool through the use of home iceboxes grew in popularity, using ice harvested during the winter months on virtually every river and most lakes in the upper Midwest. Large ice harvesting operations were located at almost every Fox River dam and on many area creeks as well, with thousands of tons warehoused each winter. The ice was then used to cool food in homes and businesses, as well as for the meatpacking industry, which used thousands of tons of ice in the shipment of dressed pork and beef carcasses from Midwest meat packing plants to eastern markets.

Mechanical ice manufacturing plants began replacing ice harvesting operations early in the 20th Century. By then, refrigeration technology was advancing and sufficient electrical power was available to operate ice-making machinery. The ice harvesting industry put up a fight, disdainfully labeling the mechanically-produced product ‘artificial ice.’ But the increasing pollution of the Midwest’s streams and lakes made using ‘natural’ ice a chancy thing; it was much easier to assure uniform quality in ice plants. By 1910, several of Chicago’s 71 ice dealers were advertising manufactured ice.

A huge ice harvesting operation was located just above the Oswego dam until the ice houses burned down in the 1890s. Similar businesses were located at dam sites up and down the Fox River Valley. (Little White School Museum collection)

Polluted water sources and warm winters combined to make Fox Valley ice harvesting chancy through the first two decades of the 20th Century. And then on April 20, 1921, the Kendall County Record reported a first for the area: “S.J. Wittrup has installed a new iceless refrigerator in his [Yorkville] restaurant and will be independent of the ice shortage this summer.”

Just a year later, in March 1922, the Record’s Hugh Marshall predicted, “Now that iceless refrigeration has been simplified to the point where it is suitable for the home, it is safe to predict that it will not be long before it will be within the reach of even those of very modest pocketbooks, and all need of bothering with the iceman, with his pick and tongs, will be gone.”

Restaurants weren’t the only businesses benefiting from new refrigeration technology. On May 3, 1922, the Record’s Oswego correspondent reported: “Charles Schultz has recently installed a modern refrigerating plant in his [grocery] store.”

Legitimate businesses were quickly joined by the burgeoning field of bootlegging, which quickly adopted modern refrigeration. When lawmen raided John Schickler’s illegal distilling operation along modern Ill. Route 31 near Oswego, the Record reported on March 28, 1923: “The still was of 23-gallon capacity a day, connected to a pump operated by electricity for cooling and assisted by a special gas arrangement. Schickler is a former Oswego saloonkeeper, going into the farming business when Oswego went dry. In his new business he bought a medical preparation of alcohol rub by the case and distilled the poisonous ingredients out, leaving the pure grain alcohol.”

Apparently seeing the error of his ways, Schickler got out of the bootlegging business and instead he and his son went into the dairy business, bottling milk in the same basement of his home where he’d previously been bottling bootleg whiskey.

Once refrigeration technology was understood, it wasn’t all that big a leap from making ice to producing cool air to make buildings more comfortable.

Some of those first air conditioning systems were installed in movie theaters and barbershops. The early systems were simple heat exchangers that were hooked up to a town’s municipal water supply. Water flowed through the heat exchanger’s fins and coils as an electric fan circulated the cooled air through the occupied portions of buildings. The systems were efficient and relatively inexpensive to operate—provided there was access to plenty of cheap municipal water.

Roy Roalson (left) gives a customer a trim in his barbershop on South Main Street in Oswego in 1936. They did both men’s and women’s hair in Roy’s shop. The shop’s Frididaire air conditioner is just out of the frame to the far right. (Little White School Museum collection)

While such systems really weren’t practical for home use, technology was marching on. The Record reported on July 20, 1932: “Not long ago, we read an article about the excellent work that is being done with systems for cooling and washing air prior to its use in buildings. The work is now at the stage where systems are being contemplated for use in private homes. Theatres and large public buildings already are using cooling systems. Anyhow, we read the article and didn’t think much about it at the time. But during the scorching nights last week when we couldn’t sleep on account of the heat, we lay in bed and wished with all our might that we had such a cooling apparatus in our house.”

Here in Oswego, barber Roy Roalson installed a heat-exchanger air conditioning system in his shop on South Main Street in 1936. Manufactured by Frigidaire, the blocky unit cooled the barbershop for the next 55 years with little or no maintenance required.

By the 1950s, home window air conditioners were appearing. I remember seeing my first at a neighbor’s farmhouse (they also had the first TV in the neighborhood) and marveling at how much better my asthmatic lungs worked there.

These days, air conditioning is almost considered a must for modern survival during Illinois’ hot humid summers, especially during these days when the tall corn is growing and summer’s Dog Days are on the horizon. And it’s starting to look like our neighbors along the Pacific Coast may be looking at dealing with the same kinds of muggy, uncomfortable summers—at least some of the time—that we here in the Midwest have grown up with.

Advertisement

Northern Illinois winters are still challenging–even with global warming

Winter snows have dusted—and often buried—Kendall County’s present landscape since glaciers shaped it some tens of thousands of years ago.

The area’s first inhabitants were Stone Age hunters who gradually moved north as the huge ice sheet, which once covered our area here in northern Illinois to a depth of several thousand feet, retreated. The glacial melt and the climate change it caused not only created the Fox Valley’s landforms, but also produced the area’s rich soil.

During the summer, those ancient wandering hunters had a relatively easy life–game of all sizes was abundant along the ice edge and there were plenty of native plants to add to their diet. During that era, northern Illinois’ landscape strongly resembled that seen in northern Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan, and was dominated by spruce forests.

Northern Illinois’ first inhabitants arrived as they followed the herds of Ice Age animals, that, in turn, were following the retreating glaciers.

In winter, living for the hunter-gatherer groups got more difficult. In the truly harsh winters of that era it is likely they ate dried wild fruits, nuts, and berries along with dried meat and fish. But food storage technology was not much advanced during that era, making it difficult for the Native People to preserve food for the long winters they had to endure.

The struggle for survival by these groups is illustrated today by the remains of ancient campsites found in Kendall County, especially in the Morgan Creek area of Oswego Township. The creek valley is actually the remains of a prehistoric glacial lake, around whose rim many ancient campsites have been discovered. In addition, characteristic projectile points from this prehistoric period have been discovered on the ridges around the old glacial lake and at several other Kendall County sites.

As the years passed, those glacial lakes disappeared, filling in with silt, while the Fox River continued to cut its way down through layers of limestone, slowly decreasing in volume as the glaciers that originally fed it with their melt water retreated far to the north and eventually disappeared.

During the next several centuries, successive Indian groups moved in and through the Fox Valley, only to be dispossessed by other groups seeking to control the rich hunting grounds. Pothole lakes gouged by the glaciers silted in and became marshes and sloughs that supported huge numbers of game animals.

The Fox River’s bottomlands, enriched by the silt deposits washed off the prairies, were heavily farmed by highly organized Indian groups of the Mississippian Cultural Tradition.

The Mississippians had invaded Illinois about 800 A.D. from the south, pushing out or absorbing the resident Hopewell people. Large numbers of Mississippians probably lived in Kendall County, extensively farming the river bottom, especially in the area of today’s Silver Springs State Fish and Wildlife Area. Large amounts of Mississippian pottery shards were uncovered when the new Five Mile Bridge across the Fox was built near Silver Springs State Park several decades ago.

Because the Mississippian culture relied heavily on farming for subsistence, winter fell much less heavily on them than it had on the area’s ancient hunters. During the winter months, Mississippians probably hunted when the weather permitted as they whiled away the cold weather repairing fishing nets, making tools, and eating the preserved corn, beans and squash they’d harvested.

Len Tantillo’s fine painting of Native American hunters returning to their winter camp gives a little of the atmosphere of a time when surviving an Illinois winter was not nearly as easy as it is now.

By the time the first Europeans arrived in Illinois, the Mississippian people had vanished, their civilization possibly destroyed by the same climate changes that destroyed Native Peoples’ cultural traditions in the West and Southwest. It appears the Mississippians broke up into tribal groups that eventually became the Illinois Confederacy and related tribes Europeans found living here when they explored the region in the 1600s. Starting in the 1680s, Europeans and Americans of European descent slowly pushed northern Illinois’ Native People west of the Mississippi River, finally in the 1830s completing a pattern begun thousands of years before.

The area’s first pioneer settlers followed roughly the same seasonal rituals as did the Native People they displaced, saving up food during the warm months in order to survive northern Illinois’ often-brutal winters.

Permanent American settlers arrived in Kendall County in the late 1820s, building their log cabins and barns and rail fences in the southern part of the county. Like the Native People they’d soon displace, the settlers farmed in summer to store up enough food to last through the area’s severe winters. In order to create more tillable land, the farmers cut down the county’s groves, straightened the creeks, and drained the glacier-created wetlands, all of which had negative effects on periodic flooding and erosion.

The descendants of those first settlers also managed to use the Fox Valley’s harsh winter weather as a money-maker. Every town along the Fox River boasted a mill and dam. Since mechanical refrigeration was unknown, huge quantities of ice were required to preserve food in homes and businesses and to cool meat shipped East from Chicago’s sprawling stockyards. Companies were established to organize ice harvesting at the area’s dam sites. Each winter, tons of ice were cut and stored in icehouses to await shipment later in the year.

Esch Brothers & Rabe’s huge ice houses on the east bank of the Fox River about a half mile north of downtown Oswego supplied huge quantities of ice for home and commercial use. (Little White School Museum collection)

According to an article in the Jan. 25, 1883 Kendall County Record, the Esch Brothers and Rabe Ice Company harvested 1,000 tons of ice a day from the pond behind the dam at Parker’s Mills, just north of Oswego’s downtown, storing it in huge ice houses, the largest of which measured 150 feet by 180 feet. The company owned a similar operation at Yorkville.

In most of 19th Century Kendall County, though, the pace of life slowed in winter. Farmers fed their livestock, cut firewood, split fence rails, and repaired equipment while the rest of the area’s residents kept warm and attended numerous dinners, speeches, and church services. They also enjoyed getting their sleighs out, harnessing up the family driving horse and went “dashing through the snow.” As the Record reported in December 1886, “The roads are now in splendid condition for a light fall of snow to make good sleighing–in fact, you will find a cutter [one-horse open sleigh] runs very nicely now on most roads.

Dashing through the snow in a one-horse open sleigh.

Today, with all-weather roads and modern autos, life in winter is not much different than life in summer, and in fact becomes more hectic during the holiday season, even this one that has been so seriously affected by the pandemic. In fact, global climate change is resulting in more and more mild winters here on the northern Illinois prairies.

But as we drive on slushy roads and look towards a cold and wintry New Years, it may be well to remember it was not always thus. In a simpler, less populated, chillier time, during the snowy winter of 1887 with no motorized traffic on area roads and streets, the Record’s Oswego correspondent could admiringly write: “Tobogganing was the rage during the last week; there was a good natural slide down Benton Street from John Young’s, and crowds of young and old enjoyed themselves.”