Daggett: Where the Borax Came Down from the Desert

Daggett is a Mojave Desert crossroads that peaked before Route Sixty-Six existed. In the eighteen eighties it grew up on the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad line, serving the mines of the surrounding desert. The famous twenty-mule teams from Death Valley's Harmony Borax Works actually ran to the railhead at Mojave, but Daggett had its own borax connection, and in eighteen ninety-one Francis Marion Smith moved here to run his borax mining operations. Daggett's Stone Hotel served miners and teamsters passing through.

The arrival of the National Old Trails Highway, which Route Sixty-Six followed, gave Daggett a second life as a desert rest stop. Today the town is perhaps best known as the site of one of the earliest large-scale solar energy installations in the United States, the Solar Energy Generating Systems plant built in the nineteen eighties in the flat desert north of town, a precursor to the utility-scale solar industry that now covers much of the Mojave.