Cramerton: Where Air Conditioning Got Its Name
Near Charlotte, North Carolina
The man who gave air conditioning its name built the town you are passing through. Stuart Warren Cramer was born in Thomasville, trained as an engineer, and by the turn of the twentieth century had designed or equipped nearly a hundred and fifty cotton mills across the South. He became obsessed with controlling humidity and temperature inside those mills, holding more than sixty patents on ventilation and conditioning systems.
On May seventeenth, nineteen oh six, standing before the American Cotton Manufacturers Association in Asheville, he used the phrase air conditioning for the first time. A year later the U.S.
Patent Office granted him the first patent under that name. In nineteen ten Cramer took over a small spinning mill along the South Fork of the Catawba River and turned the surrounding community into a model mill village, paving streets, installing indoor plumbing, and eventually renaming everything after himself. Cramerton has carried his name since nineteen twenty-two.
