Casa del Desierto: The Harvey House That Saved the Mojave Crossing
California
Before Route Sixty-Six, before the automobile, before anything that looked like modern travel, there was Fred Harvey. And Fred Harvey built a palace in the middle of the Mojave Desert.
Fred Harvey was an English immigrant who looked at the miserable food being served to rail passengers in the American West and saw an opportunity. Starting in eighteen seventy-six, he opened a chain of restaurants and hotels along the Santa Fe Railway, staffed by young women recruited from the East, the Harvey Girls, who were held to strict standards of service and conduct. The Harvey Houses changed what it meant to travel in America: for the first time, a long-distance train passenger could expect a clean tablecloth, a hot meal, and fresh coffee, delivered in twenty minutes flat during a station stop.
Barstow's Harvey House, known as Casa del Desierto, opened in nineteen eleven, replacing an earlier structure destroyed by fire. The Mission Revival building was extraordinary: red-tiled roofs, arched loggias, a lobby with floors of stone imported from Mexico. It housed a hotel, a lunchroom, a dining room, and a news stand. At its peak, the Santa Fe ran a dozen trains a day through Barstow, and the Harvey Girls served every one of them.
The house closed in nineteen fifty-nine as rail travel collapsed and the car took over. It was used as a bus station for decades. By the nineteen eighties the building was deteriorating badly. A local preservation effort eventually secured federal and state funds, and a painstaking restoration returned Casa del Desierto to something close to its original grandeur. Today it houses the Western America Railroad Museum and Amtrak's Barstow station.
The Harvey Girls themselves became an unlikely symbol: Samuel Hopkins Adams wrote a novel about them, and Judy Garland played one in the nineteen forty-six MGM musical. They were among the first women to hold steady employment west of the Mississippi, recruited into a job that was respectable precisely because Fred Harvey said so.
