The Refrigerator Capital, Servel, Appliances, and Industrial Evansville

During the nineteen thirties and nineteen forties, if you bought a refrigerator anywhere in the United States, there was a meaningful chance it had been made in Evansville, Indiana. The city had quietly become one of the most important appliance manufacturing centers in the country, and the industry that defined it was built on an unlikely technology: gas-powered refrigeration. The Servel company, whose name came from the slogan Serving Electricity, was based in Evansville and produced the Servel Electrolux gas refrigerator, which had no moving parts, ran silently, and could operate in areas without reliable electrical service.

For rural America in the years before the Rural Electrification Administration had wired the countryside, a gas refrigerator was not a luxury alternative to an electric model, it was the only refrigerator that worked. Servel sold them across the country and built a business that employed thousands of Evansville workers. International Harvester also maintained a major plant in Evansville producing refrigerators and appliances.

At the peak of Evansville's appliance era, the city produced a remarkable percentage of American refrigerators, earning the informal title of Refrigerator Capital of the World. The prosperity lasted through the postwar boom and into the nineteen fifties, when suburban expansion and rising incomes created enormous consumer demand for all the appliances Evansville made. But by the nineteen sixties, the competitive landscape was shifting.

Labor costs, corporate consolidation, and the emergence of offshore manufacturing began eroding the local industry. Plants closed in stages across the nineteen sixties and seventies. What those decades of manufacturing left behind was a working-class city with strong union traditions, a culture of making things, and a physical plant of former factory buildings that are still being repurposed today.