Does anyone have any good stories about how their ancestors handled it?
Did any families have a “summer kitchen”? Meaning they moved the stove outside in the summer?
Did people sleep down in their cellars?
Does anyone remember having a true “ice box” and getting ice from an ice man?
Did any families have a summer home?
Anyone?
By living in England.
It works.
My ancestors were Scandinavian, so, yeah, probably that. They say that Scandinavian summers are the best day in the entire year. I have no idea how they got through Arctic winters before electric lights and central heating, though; that’s bad enough even these days.
Suffering through it was the standard approach.
Fans were traditionally used.
The air conditioner was probably the most significant factor as to why Florida grew in population from 2.8 million in 1950 to 21 million now.
I was almost eight years old before we got our first air conditioner in 1959. That was after we moved from the part of town where a fine canopy of old, large trees sheltered houses from the Alabama sun pretty well; everyone in that part of town depended on electric and hand powered fans. (Actually the two mom & pop grocery stores had A/C.)
It was mostly a matter of just sucking it up, taking naps during the hottest part of the day, moving slowly, staying in the shade, and doing as little strenuous work as possible.
The winters weren’t a lot of fun, either.
For kids a lot more time spend in water.
Sleeping downstairs/in cooler areas was also common.
IDK about moving the stove outside, but certainly cooking outside.
I am 65. The house where I grew up did not have air conditioning at all’ We had window fans and just pretty much put up with the heat. I married The Incomparable Sunflower when I was 22, and the apartment we moved into was the first place I lived that had central air conditioning.
By ‘ancestors’ are you just talking about parents/grandparents/great grandparents? I have no idea how my ancestors from 100’s of years ago dealt with the heat, my my parents and grandparents would sleep on the porch or in a living room that had better airflow.
Some house are also designed around not having AC. For example, shotgun houses have a door and window in the front and door/window at the rear. Opening both of them will allow air to flow straight through. Similarly, you can open the windows on either side if the breeze is going that way (again, they’re designed for that).
My Daddy’s family slept on sleeping porches. The daytime was punctuated with an afternoon break where they all went to pond and swam. He remembered the first ice box they got. Before that perishables were kept in a spring house or down the well.
Ancestors? Heck, I grew up without air conditioning in the early sixties. We would run through a sprinkler in the yard, go to the local pool, go to the beach, go to the movies, go to the mall, anyplace cool. At night you slept with the windows open and a fan blowing.
My father’s house was 1 and a half stories - bedrooms in the attic. They were too hot in summer, too cold in winter. In summer we slept on the porch, one bed and mattress on the floor for me. My uncle was in the curtain/shade business, and the porch had bamboo shades on three sides. When my father had the house insulated he had to add partitions to keep the upstairs from over-heating in the winter.
The old farmhouse next door had a second kitchen with second stove for summer. It also had a two-holer for winter use, with another outside down the walk for the rest of the year. The farmer thought butter-milk from the cool, earth-floored cellar was just the drink on a hot day. Men of the neighborhood cut ice from the mill pond and stored it in the sawdust packed ice house near us. Home made ice cream with local ice was just the thing in July.
Yeah, what’s with the “ancestor” stuff? My family didn’t have air conditioning until I was 11 years old.
The house I live in now, which was built in the 1950s, has a whole house fan, so we can keep a constant breeze going (which makes sleeping a lot more tolerable.) Otherwise, sleep outside.
In addition to what** Joey P** said, some older house had higher ceilings, transom windows above the doors, big wraparound porches and other features to funnel the worst heat away. Trees close to the house not only provide shade in summer, but can be a windbreak in winter.
The other thing to remember is that people acclimated to the heat. Hell, my grandparents were farmers, and my mother and her siblings literally grew up outside.
The house I live in now, which was built in the 1950s, has a whole house fan, so we can keep a constant breeze going (which makes sleeping a lot more tolerable.) Otherwise, sleep outside.
In addition to what** Joey P** said, some older house had higher ceilings, transom windows above the doors, big wraparound porches and other features to funnel the worst heat away. Trees close to the house not only provide shade in summer, but can be a windbreak in winter.
The other thing to remember is that people acclimated to the heat. Hell, my grandparents were farmers, and my mother and her siblings literally grew up outside. You do as much as you can in the morning (like cooking, which is one reason the midday meal was often the main meal) so you can take it easy during the worst heat.
They also conserved energy by not double posting. :smack:
We did have air conditioning in the house we moved to when I was 9. But my mom kept a basement kitchen, both for overflow holiday cooking and to keep the house cool by cooking downstairs when it was hot out. We ran the AC, but they wanted to keep it to a minimum.
Speaking as a child ancestor here, we stayed in the cool concrete basement eating frozen grapes and watching tv.
In earlier times, we burrowed deep into the earth and estivated.
As some have alluded, one big thing that was different was the architecture. Some pioneers lived in dugouts. Even with more substantial homes, traditional architecture was tailored for the climate.
Here’s a house from a hot climate.
Here’s one from a cold climate, with lots of snow.
The difference is like night and day.
We closed up the whole house before the sun came up, it wouldn’t last all day but closing all the windows and drapes would buy you a few hours. We opened up the whole house when the sun went down. My dad would spray water all over the front porch where we had a big fan blowing in, kind of a fake swamp cooler. Sometimes we went to bed with a damp towel.
I first got air conditioning when I was 25 years old. I lived my first couple decades in Nevada with no air conditioning and lived to tell the tale.
In the south they dealt with the heat by building very high ceilings. Heat having a tendency to rise and all. Some places they have naps in the afternoon. On the Amazon they’ll often spend the day in the water and come out at night. Here in Idaho we open the windows at night and close them when the day gets hot, and with ceiling fans. I don’t have central a/c or central heating and we stay warm in the winter with wood fires.