He brought good food and potential wives out West.
Fred Harvey came West with a dream that cost a dollar—a meal fit for a lady or a gentleman, if not a reigning king or queen. He also brought hope to many young women in search of a responsible husband and to many young Western males looking for a respectable wife. The dream worked out to the tune of an estimated 5,000Western marriages —and more good railroad depot meals than anyone could keep track of. As Will Rogers said long after Fred had retired from the stage of life, Harvey “kept the West in food and wives.”
Frederick Henry Harvey was born in London on June 27, 1835, and immigrated to the United States at age 17. He entered the restaurant business as a teenager in New York City, where for $2 a week he scrubbed pots and bused tables. By the Civil War he had migrated west and worked his way up to cook. In 1862 he shifted over to the railroad business, working on the Hannibal & St. Joseph Railroad as perhaps history’s first mobile mail clerk. He rode in a boxcar converted into a post office, sorting letters picked up along the route and filing them for delivery at the train’s stops. Harvey later sold newspaper advertising space for the Leavenworth, Kan., Times & Conservative, securing an advance of $3,000 a year in commissions—a hefty sum at a time when workmen were usually paid $2 a day and Army privates $13 a month. He suffered from gastrointestinal problems, likely genetic but possibly from eating too much railroad food.
Three times a day the trains rolling through inhabited areas pulled up to depots for meals, and hungry passengers took their chances. Some restaurateurs reportedly bribed the engineers to blow the whistles ahead of schedule, prompting diners to scurry out and leave large heaps of leftovers on their plates, which the cooks would reheat and serve to the next shift of diners hours or days later. Some passengers eschewed the rough eateries and reheated meals in favor of shoebox lunches of fried chicken, hard-boiled eggs, hard cheese and pie, though these comestibles got rank after a couple of days on the rails.
Fred Harvey saw an opportunity, and in 1875 he and a partner opened three restaurants on the Kansas Pacific line. Fred then decided to go out on his own. In the winter of 1875–76, he approached Charles A. Morse, superintendent of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad and, in a gentleman’s agreement, took over management of a tiny lunchroom on the second floor of the Topeka depot. Most railroads operated at a loss where food was concerned, so Morse extended to Harvey a sweetheart deal: no rent for restaurant space in depots and free rail transportation for Harvey’s foodstuffs and employees. Two years later Harvey bought and cleaned up a rundown hotel in Florence, Kan., an important rail terminal. He then took the bold step of offering William Phillips, head chef of the elegant Palmer House in Chicago, $5,000 a year to prepare top-quality European cuisine for railroad passengers. The food was so good that traveling salesmen and other experienced travelers began to favor the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe over the other railroads, revitalizing the flagging passenger business.
Fred Harvey’s signature move came in 1883. Waiters at railroad depots weren’t schooled in the niceties of gracious drinking. After drinking more liquor than they served, the waiters sometimes got into arguments and even fistfights with customers. Phillips’ cuisine had boosted the food quality, but service still needed improvement. It was actually Fred’s friend Tom Gable, whom Harvey had recently hired to run the Raton house in New Mexico Territory, who had the idea to replace male waiters with women. “The girls,” said Stephen Fried, who has written a book about Fred Harvey’s enterprise, “were hired primarily because of racism and high testosterone levels in the new Harvey restaurants in New Mexico, where the African-American waiters were under constant pressure.”
Harvey put out a call for women between the ages of 18 and 30, of good character with at least an eighth-grade education—the equivalent of a high school education today. The girls traveled to Kansas City for the hiring interviews. Harvey Girls, as those hired were called, were promised $17.50 a month plus room, board and tips—and in return promised not to marry for at least six months after signing on.
The girls, according to the 1950s and ’60s writings of Lucius Beebe, slept in dormitories with a housemother to keep an eye on them and a 10 p.m. curfew, unless a late train was expected. Each house also maintained a“courting parlor,” where the girls could entertain prospective husbands without compromising their own or the company’s reputation. The girls wore conservative feminine uniforms: black shoes and stockings, a full-length plain black skirt, a long-sleeved blouse with a high “Elsie” collar and black bow tie, a starched white apron and a white bow in their simply arranged hair. Wearing makeup and chewing gum while on the job were forbidden.
As a train pulled into the depot, the engineer blew the whistle, and a uniformed employee would hit a big brass gong at the first sight of customers, summoning them to dinner. The Harvey Girls would appear, some taking orders from the tables of eight to 10 diners, the others pouring coffee, tea or milk as requested. A male manager would deliver the main course of steak or roast—a custom of commercial hospitality since Colonial times. The girls reassured passengers the train wouldn’t leave without them.
Harvey’s plan was to have a depot restaurant every 100 miles, and indeed he established Harvey houses from Kansas all the way to California. Improved locomotives in the 1880s and ’90s sped up the train schedules, but that didn’t change the number of Harvey restaurants.
In 1888–89 Harvey began operating a dining car between Chicago and Kansas City. In March 1889 a dining-car meal cost 75 cents, the menu consisting of blue point oysters and cream of barley soup, choice of boiled fresh salmon with shrimp sauce, roast beef, young turkey with cranberry sauce, roast spring lamb or stuffed loin of veal, with mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, new beets, asparagus on toast and spinach. Fresh lobster, chicken salad and cold ham were also available, with sliced tomatoes and dressed lettuce. Dessert could be apple or peach pie, rice pudding with vanilla sauce, assorted fruit, assorted cakes, Batger’s orange jelly and New York ice cream. Edam and Roquefort cheese with Bent’s water crackers and French coffee rounded out the meal. Until the mid-1890s, though, few dining cars operated in the Western states and territories.
Meanwhile, the chaste appeal of the Harvey Girls and the gastronomic delights of Harvey cuisine made the eating houses as popular as ever. The Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe proudly advertised: FRED HARVEY MEALS ALL THE WAY. Newspaper editor William Allen White was a big fan, writing: “It is the best in America. Deponent has in the past six months eaten meals on 10 of the great railway systems of the country. Harvey meals are so much better than the meals of other railroads, east, west, north and south, that the comparison seems trite.”
Harvey believed in quantity as well as quality. Most dining establishments cut their pies into sixths. He had his cut into quarters for more ample portions. He operated his own dairies to ensure the milk was fresh. Harvey was also known to flip over a whole table if the settings weren’t proper. He also worked to keep his Harvey Girls out of the clutches of prospective husbands. If a girl did work six months without getting married, the company gave her a round-trip ticket anywhere the Santa Fe ran and offered her another six-month contract.
Beginning in 1899 the Santa Fe began building stylish new depots in the local vernacular architecture (rugged Southwest style was most popular). By then Fred Harvey was ill, and his son Ford was running the restaurant business. Fred died at age 66 on February 9, 1901, but sons and grandsons maintained the business through most of the 20th century. At its peak the company ran 25 hotels, 40 sit-down dining rooms, 55 lunchrooms and all the terminal restaurants and stores in Chicago, St. Louis, Kansas City, Houston, Galveston, Wichita, Los Angeles and Cleveland. A persistent story says Fred Harvey kept his obsession with quantity and quality to the end. Legend has it that his last words to those gathered at his side were, “Don’t slice the ham too thin!” Not true—he was in a coma on his deathbed.
Thanks to Stephen Fried for his assistance with this article. For further reading, see Fried’s 2010 book Appetite for America: How Visionary Businessman Fred Harvey Built a Railroad Hospitality Empire That Civilized the Wild West.
Originally published in the April 2011 issue of Wild West. To subscribe, click here.