Goffs Schoolhouse: Classroom, Canteen, and Desert Archive

The schoolhouse at Goffs has had more careers than most buildings in the Mojave Desert.

Goffs itself began as a railroad junction in eighteen eighty-three, when the Atlantic and Pacific Railway laid tracks through the eastern Mojave. It became a more significant node in eighteen ninety-three, when the California Eastern Railway branched off the main line here to run north, eventually becoming the sole supply rail connection to a small Nevada settlement that would be renamed Las Vegas. At its peak, Goffs was a railroad division point with water tanks, a machine shop, and a substantial crew. Gold discoveries in the New York Mountains in the eighteen nineties added a mining dimension. The town grew enough to justify a proper school.

The Goffs Schoolhouse was built in nineteen fourteen in the Mission Revival style, a single room with white stucco walls and arched windows that looked slightly out of place in the flat, bleached landscape around it. For twenty-three years it served as a school and community gathering space, hosting dances and a branch of the county library. It closed in nineteen thirty-seven when the railroad reorganized and the local population thinned.

Five years later, Goffs found a second life. General George Patton's Desert Training Center, the largest military training installation in American history, covered roughly eighteen thousand square miles of desert across California, Arizona, and Nevada. Goffs sat inside that perimeter. Between nineteen forty-two and nineteen forty-four, more than ten thousand troops bound for the North Africa campaign trained in the surrounding terrain, learning to fight in heat and dust and rock. The schoolhouse was converted into a canteen and mess hall. The building that had educated the children of railroad workers now fed soldiers preparing for the invasion of Tunisia and Sicily.

The California Historic Route Sixty-Six Association and the Mojave Desert Heritage and Cultural Association eventually restored the schoolhouse and opened it as a museum. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in two thousand one. Inside, the collections document the railroad era, the Route Sixty-Six decades, and the wartime training years, three entirely different histories that the same building quietly absorbed.