Holbrook: Too Tough for Women or Churches

In eighteen eighty-one, the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad drove its tracks through a desert crossing known as Horsehead Crossing. A station appeared almost overnight and the settlement was named Holbrook in honor of H. R. Holbrook, the railroad's first chief engineer.

For the next few decades, the town earned a reputation as one of the roughest in Arizona Territory. Cowboys, cattle ranchers, and railroad workers poured in, along with the usual frontier vices. A saloon called the Bucket of Blood gave you a sense of the social atmosphere. Into the early nineteen hundreds, Holbrook was reportedly the only county seat in the United States without a single church.

The town eventually settled down enough to become the county seat of Navajo County. Route Sixty-Six later ran directly through the middle of it, and today Holbrook serves as the eastern gateway to the Painted Desert and Petrified Forest National Park. The wigwam motels still stand on the old Mother Road as a reminder of the era when every Route Sixty-Six town was chasing the tourist dollar.