Who The Hell is Fred Harvey?
Since 1876, when English immigrant Fred Harvey took over the trackside restaurants of the fledgling Santa Fe Railroad, people have been asking who the hell he is, and why his restaurants, hotels, dining cars and Harvey Girl waitresses were so intriguing.
From a second-floor train station dining room in Topeka, Kansas, the forty-something hospitality entrepreneur grew his company until it extended from Chicago West to the Pacific, and South to the Gulf of Mexico—over sixty-five restaurants and lunch counters, sixty dining cars, a dozen large hotels, and all the retail shops in five of the nation’s largest union stations. Fred himself died in 1901, just as his son Ford and the company were embarking on their greatest adventure—El Tovar, a four-star hotel at the lip of the Grand Canyon. It was the cornerstone of an empire that reinvented tourism in the Southwest, and introduced the world to Native American art, cowboy culture, mission architecture, the Santa Fe Style of company design guru Mary Colter, and New York and Paris quality food and service in the middle of nowhere. The multigenerational business became so much part of American history and culture that in 1946 Judy Garland starred in an Oscar-winning musical film about Fred and his waitresses, “The Harvey Girls.”
Except for the hotels at the Grand Canyon and La Fonda in Santa Fe, most Harvey locations closed after the second world war and the company was sold in the 1970s. But a renaissance in interest in all things Fred Harvey, Santa Fe Railway, Harvey Girls and Mary Colter began in the 1990s, as a way of reinvigorating old western railroad towns, starting with the restoration of La Posada in Winslow, Arizona. The 2010 publication of a new biography of Fred, Appetite for America, and events in New Mexico and Arizona, helped Harvey fans (or “FredHeads”) from all over the world start finding each other. And a great old American story now inspires a new generation.
So, who the hell was Fred Harvey?
An Englishman who came to America in the 1850s, he built a family and a career and then, in his early forties, started a revolutionary business feeding train passengers in the Wild West along the Santa Fe railroad. While he died famous and wealthy, he was also a curiosity— a man out of time— because at the height of the Gilded Age, he became something much better understood today: the founding father of the American service industry. That’s why his story and his methods are still studied in graduate schools of hotel, restaurant, and personnel management, advertising, and marketing. He is especially popular in the buzzwordy fields of “branding” and “brand extension,” because “Fred Harvey” was actually the first widely known and respected brand name in America, established years before Coca- Cola.
“Fred Harvey” is also the name of the company he founded. Not Fred Harvey Inc. or The Fred Harvey Company. Just Fred Harvey. Why that is turns out to be one of the great untold family business sagas in American history— a tale not just about one brilliant, driven man and his empire but also about his largely unsung son Ford, who actually ran the company far longer than his father, but stayed out of the spotlight so the public would think famous Fred was still alive, an ingenious marketing device. Because of Fred and Ford Harvey, this innovative family business played a crucial role in American culture from the post–Civil War era all the way through World War II.
Fred Harvey ran all the restaurants and hotels along the country’s largest railroad, the Santa Fe between Chicago and Los Angeles; went on to serve the nation’s cross- country drivers on Route 66, the first superhighway; and even played a vital role in the formative, thrilling, and scary years of the airline business— because Fred’s grandson Freddy was an original partner in TWA with Charles Lindbergh and Henry Ford.
Fred Harvey’s “eating houses” were prototypes of the disparate dining experiences that characterize American eating: They had formal, sit-down dining rooms (in which even cowboys were expected to wear jackets), attached to large casual dining areas with long curved counters (the genesis of the classic American diner), attached to take-out coffee and sandwich stands (the original Starbucks). Yet this curious Englishman turned out to be more than just a brilliantly successful manager of hotels and restaurants and a true Horatio Alger story come to life (during the time when Alger actually was writing those stories). He created the first national chain of restaurants, of hotels, of newsstands, and of bookstores— in fact, the first national chain of anything— in America.
But unlike the chains of today, the Fred Harvey system was known for dramatically raising standards wherever it arrived, rather than eroding them. It turns out that being a fast-food nation was originally a good thing.
At its peak, Fred Harvey had over sixty-five restaurants and lunch counters, sixty dining cars, a dozen large hotels, all the restaurants and retail shops in five of the nation’s largest railroad stations, and so many newsstands and bookshops that its prepublication orders regularly affected national best-seller lists. For many years, before highways and telephones and broadcast media connected the nation, there was only one thing that linked major cities as disparate as Chicago, Dallas, Cleveland, Kansas City, Los Angeles, St. Louis, and San Francisco, as well as small towns as far- flung as Needles, California; Joplin, Missouri; Raton, New Mexico; Purcell, Oklahoma; Rosenberg, Texas; and Chanute, Kansas. In each locale, the place to have dinner on a special occasion or simply a miraculous cup of coffee anytime was a Fred Harvey restaurant.
Fred Harvey was Ray Kroc before McDonald’s, J. W. Marriott before Marriott Hotels, Howard Johnson before Hojo’s, Joe Horn and Frank Hardart before Horn & Hardart’s, Howard Schultz before Starbucks And from the moment in 1878 when he lured the top chef at Chicago’s vaunted Palmer House to run his first high- end restaurant and hotel— in a refurbished fleabag in Florence, Kansas, a town so small that the population often doubled when the Santa Fe train pulled in to the station— Fred Harvey’s managers and chefs became some of the first hospitality heroes of America. When the son of Kaiser Wilhelm stayed at La Fonda, the legendary Fred Harvey hotel in Santa Fe, he was thrilled to discover in the kitchen Chef Konrad Allgaier, who had cooked for his family in Germany.
Fred Harvey was also Walt Disney before Disneyland. He and his partners at the Santa Fe played a huge role in the development of American tourism as we know it. Fred Harvey was largely responsible for the creation of the Grand Canyon as the country’s premier natural tourist attraction, as well as the development of the mythic Southwest and what grew into the National Park System. Fred Harvey was also the most important driving force in the early appreciation and preservation— and, to some, exploitation— of Native American arts and culture. Most of the Indian art and crafts now on display in the world’s major museums were originally owned by Fred Harvey. And much of the silver and turquoise jewelry that we think of as indigenous was commissioned, and in some cases even designed, by the Fred Harvey company to sell in its myriad gift shops. Fred Harvey was also the first company to embrace Native American and Spanish-American imagery in architecture and design, inventing what is now known as “Santa Fe style.” Many of the best- known paintings and photos, and much of the best writing about the Southwest and the West, were originally commissioned or enabled by Fred Harvey.
The restaurants and hotels run by this transplanted Londoner and his son did more than just revolutionize American dining and service. They became a driving force in helping the United States shed its envy of European society and begin to appreciate and even romanticize its own culture.
“More than any single organization, the Fred Harvey System introduced America to Americans,” wrote a historian in the 1950s.
And it’s just as true today. Because, whether we know it or not, we still live in Fred Harvey’s America.
Detours through the Southwest for over a Century
Fred Harvey began feeding rail passengers in the Midwest and West in trackside restaurants and later dining cars and new union stations. But its enduring legacy is its grand hotels in New Mexico and Arizona, allowing drivers and train travelers to take the same scenic Southwest Detours that have captivated locals and visitors since the first Santa Fe Railway train pulled into the depot at the Grand Canyon in 1901.
Photo Galleries
