1.6 “Meals by Fred Harvey”
Before railroad companies began to prepare and serve meals in the 1860s, passengers were fed by entrepreneurs who hawked meals and snacks that varied from tasty to downright odious. As railroads experienced rapid expansion, so too did the types of entrepreneurs who catered to passengers, eventually giving rise to “news butchers” who sold reading material alongside sugary and salty foods that primed passengers to buy sodas, lemonade, and ice water to quench their thirst. The Englishman Fred Harvey was first exposed to the indignities of these meals while working as a mail clerk for the Kansas Pacific Railroad. In order to provide quality meals to westward-bound travelers, Harvey proposed opening a network of restaurants. Harvey first approached his employer Kansas Pacific. After they turned him down, he met with the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad (Santa Fe for short), which jumped at the offer. The first Harvey House, as the restaurants became known, opened in Topeka, Kansas, in 1876. By the turn of the century, the Harvey empire would include 65 designated restaurants, 60 dining cars, and 12 hotels. Luring Americans westward, Harvey served countless Americans the best meals they had ever eaten and transformed the Grand Canyon into a tourist destination. Perhaps most importantly, Harvey created jobs for 100,000 single women, half of whom remained out West.
Initially Harvey Houses were staffed with men who were not altogether dependable. The chaos of life in the West meant that waiters might arrive to work late or visibly injured by a barroom brawl or fail to show altogether. In order to provide dependable, friendly service, Harvey began hiring women in 1883. The first Harvey Girls proved such a success that women were soon hired to serve as waitresses at almost all of the railroad station restaurants. During the late 19th century, women who worked in the public sector and served male customers were perceived as sullied or compromised in some way. Harvey worked to raise the public perception of his female wait staff. The advertisement for Harvey Girls and the interview process itself were aimed at sorting out “wild” women. The ads called for “young women 18 to 30 years of age, of good character, attractive, and intelligent” (Poling-Kempes, 1989, p. 42). New hires were inevitably white.
Harvey Girls wore black dresses that began at the bottom of the neck and ended six inches above the ground. Make-up was verboten. New hires would sign on with a stipulation that they remain unmarried for the length of their first contract. In return, Harvey waitresses were housed in dormitories with strict curfews. Male kitchen staff slept in separate quarters. Harvey House employees worked upwards of seventy hours a week, and the most exceptional among the women could rise all the way to manager. Working and living alongside one another created such a bond among Harvey House workers that many stayed on the job for life and became highly respected founders and members of Western communities. Most Harvey Girls took pride in their work and felt part of a large, extended family. The women felt protected by the Harvey system, despite the wild, at times violent, environs. With the ability to travel and engage daily with tourists from around the world, Harvey wait staff gained independence and sophistication within a safe environment. Harvey Girls embraced the West and this affection was well-reciprocated, as their reputation raised the role of waitress from a suspect job for a woman to a respectable and competitive profession.
Cohering a National Food System
The rules and rigor of Harvey Houses coupled with a tight-knit workforce revolutionized dining in America. When Harvey Houses were first opened in New Mexico and Arizona, the territories were largely uncharted. The restaurants were often the only food service available. After the Santa Fe Railroad arrived in Los Angeles in 1887, it helped cohere a national food system. Previously, the Southern Pacific had monopolized transcontinental railroad prices, charging fees that prohibited many farmers from shipping their goods back East. Once landed in Los Angeles, the Santa Fe began shipping perishable produce and meat back East at a fraction of the cost charged by Southern Pacific. In turn, many farmers and businessmen traveled West for the first time and eventually relocated. “Meals by Fred Harvey” became a slogan of the Santa Fe, helping lure customers from competing railroads. The consistent quality of food and impeccable service at the Harvey Houses set the bar so high for hospitality, that the Harvey House operating system was long taught in hospitality programs throughout the nation.
When Harvey opened his first hotel, the Clifton House (1878), in Florence, Kansas, he hired one of the country’s best chefs to run the restaurant. Offered an enormous salary and creative license, chef William Phillips left Chicago’s Palmer House for rural Kansas, where he would help set the standards that propelled Harvey Houses to culinary stardom. With the Clifton off to a successful start, Harvey aimed even higher. Inspired by European resorts, The Montezuma hotel was built to take advantage of hot springs outside Las Vegas, New Mexico. To staff what would be the largest wooden building in the United States, Harvey journeyed to his favorite hotels to poach chefs, maître d’s, and waiters to work at the Montezuma, which soon drew a famous roster of guests, among them Theodore Roosevelt, Jesse James, and Emperor Hirohito of Japan.
The success of Fred Harvey Company would continue well past its founder’s death in 1901. Harvey’s son, Ford, had begun taking over the day to day operations of the ever-expanding business in the 1890s, so he was well prepared to take the helm by the time his father died. Although Ford was the business mastermind who kept the company thriving and expanding until the Second World War, the name Fred Harvey Company remained unchanged and the business continued on the same trajectory it had honed long before Harvey’s death. Ford’s passion for nature, however, shaped one of the most successful projects of the Harvey empire and its development of the West—the creation of the Grand Canyon as a tourist destination. An avid outdoorsman, Ford was bewitched by the Grand Canyon. To enable visitors to linger in the area, Ford built El Tovar Hotel. Opened in 1905, El Tovar was a stunning luxury hotel perched twenty feet from the canyon rim. Tourism to the Grand Canyon rose annually from 44,000 in 1919 to over 300,000 in the mid-1930s.
The system at work in the Harvey Houses was so efficient that they bid on and won the catering job for the Columbian Exhibition at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893. Working in conjunction with Chicago’s Wellington Hotel, Harvey prepared and served a seated indoor lunch to 4,500 invited guests and provided ham sandwiches, doughnuts, and coffee to the crowd of 60,000 that gathered outside.
Eventually World War II would prove the beginning of the end of Harvey Houses, which rose to the challenge of feeding the troops. The need to feed thousands on their way to war drew the best from the Harvey Girls who maintained their professionalism despite the raucous and often ill-mannered throngs of soldiers. The Harvey House culinary standard, however, could not match the demand for turning out an exponential increase in meals. By war’s end, the glorious American institution began its slow fade into history.
