Volume 2, No. 1: January 10, 2005
by William Worley
Just
as railroads dominated the development of the United States in the last third
of the 19th century, Fred Harvey came to symbolize, along with George Pullman,
the value of providing comfortable and predictable service to the rail-riding
public. Harvey House hotels and restaurants as well as Harvey Dining Car service
grew up alongside the expansion of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad.
The young women hired by Mr. Harvey to serve customers at the station stops
came to be known as “Harvey Girls.” It is not too much to say that
the Harvey style of offering meals and hotels of high quality at affordable
prices greatly stimulated rail travel and the settlement of the American West.
I became interested in Fred Harvey because he was a Kansas City regional figure
who had wide-ranging impact in the world of food and transportation, to say
nothing of social and economic history. As I studied this English immigrant,
it became clear that Harvey established the first nationally-recognized restaurant
and hotel chain in America, well before Howard Johnson popularized fried clams
and multiple flavors of ice cream. His role in opening the West to women via
the lucky coincidence of his need for inexpensive and reliable wait staff is
probably the best-known aspect of Harvey history.
As a native of New Mexico, I grew up in a railroad town - Portales, New Mexico
- that once had a Harvey lunchroom in the local Santa Fe depot. The AT&SF
Company designed the town so that streets would parallel or run perpendicular
to the rail tracks which passed through the town from the northeast to the southwest.
Later, I discovered that one of the more famous Harvey Houses, with meal and
lodging both available and with the exotic name of "Gran Quivira,"
was located in the Santa Fe division point at Clovis, 20 miles northeast of
my home town. It had closed in 1948, when I was just two years old, and I never
experienced "Meals by Fred Harvey" during my childhood.
Later, I rode the Santa Fe to visit my grandparents near Newton, Kansas.
I rode on a mail train that stopped at every village and hamlet along the route,
and there was no Harvey dining car. But I remember a boy on board selling sandwiches,
fruit, and newspapers, a boy hardly older than me. I don't think I realized
at the time that he was a Fred Harvey “butcher boy.”
In late 1967, at the tail end of the private rail passenger era, my future
wife and I traveled with a student government group from Kansas State University
to San Francisco for a student gathering. We rode in the “chair car,”
but took our meals in the dining car. There I noticed at the bottom of the meal
check the wonderful phrase—“Meals by Fred Harvey.”
As it turned out, that phrase disappeared from the Santa Fe less than three
months after our Kansas-California excursion because the company was sold, and
the Santa Fe took over dining car service until the advent of Amtrak in 1971.
So, I tip my hat and twirl my goatee in gratitude to that Brit who settled in
Leavenworth, Kansas and founded a company that served some of the finest meals
in the world in Chicago, St. Louis, Kansas City, and all along “The Atchison,
Topeka and the Santa Fe.”
Bill Worley currently serves
as a consulting historian for Union Station, Kansas City, Inc. and as an adjunct
Doctoral Faculty member in the History Department for the University of Missouri-Kansas
City. Bill is an active presenter in the MHC’s Program Bureau. He
portrayed Harry S Truman in the 2001–02 Heartland Chautauqua.
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