Essex and the Alphabet Towns: How a Railroad Named a Desert

In eighteen eighty-three, Lewis Kingman was the locating engineer for the Atlantic and Pacific Railway, surveying the route across the Mojave Desert between Needles and Barstow. He needed to name the water stops his surveyors were spacing every ten or fifteen miles across the desert, and he used the simplest possible system: the alphabet.

The stops he named ran in order from west to east, Amboy, Cadiz, Danby, Essex, Fenner, and Goffs among them. The town now called Essex was originally named Edson, and was renamed before nineteen fifteen. The letters were not meant to signify anything about the places. They were inventory codes in a ledger, applied to towns that existed because steam engines needed water every so many miles of grade.

The system worked mechanically and produced something strange: a string of desert settlements named as if they were parts of a sequence rather than communities. Which is exactly what they were, for the railroad.

Essex grew into more than a watering stop. By the nineteen thirties it had a school, a cafe, a garage, and a post office. The Automobile Club of Southern California paid to have a well installed near the roadside, providing free water to motorists on a road where summer temperatures regularly exceeded a hundred and ten degrees. The free water fountain was not a small amenity. In the nineteen thirties, during the Dust Bowl migration John Steinbeck documented in The Grapes of Wrath, the California stretch of Route Sixty-Six was the last leg of a journey families had been making for weeks, and Essex was one of the last places with water and shade before Needles and the Colorado River.

Interstate Forty bypassed Essex, along with most of the Mojave alphabet towns, when it was completed in the early nineteen seventies. The school has since closed. What remains is a collapsed gas station, some concrete foundations, and the name on a highway sign, E for Essex, letter five in a desert alphabet that nobody uses anymore.