Where Railroad Grandeur Meets the Mother Road
In the high desert city of Barstow, California, at the point where First Avenue crosses the BNSF railroad tracks on an old steel bridge, a building appears that seems to belong in another era entirely — and it does. The Casa del Desierto — Spanish for “House of the Desert” — rises from the Mojave floor in a composition of arcades and colonnades, red tapestry brick and barrel-tile rooflines, pointed tower spires and painted domes, its elegance as improbable as it is complete against the vast backdrop of desert sky and the tangle of railroad tracks that pass beside it. Built in 1911 by the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway as the flagship facility of the Fred Harvey Company in California, the Casa del Desierto was — and remains — the most architecturally distinguished building in the Mojave Desert, and one of the finest surviving examples of a Harvey House depot-hotel in the United States.
The building’s relationship with Route 66 is layered and significant. When the federal highway system designated U.S. Route 66 in 1926, it ran adjacent to the Casa del Desierto — the railroad and the highway occupying the same corridor through the Mojave, as they did for much of Route 66’s length across the American Southwest. For decades, travelers on the Mother Road and passengers on the Santa Fe’s mainline arrived in Barstow by parallel routes, and the Harvey House served both audiences. Today it is home to two free museums — the Route 66 Mother Road Museum and the Western America Railroad Museum — as well as an active Amtrak station, the Barstow Area Chamber of Commerce and Visitors Bureau, and multiple city offices. It is a National Historic Landmark, California Historical Landmark No. 892, and one of the essential stops on any serious Route 66 journey through California. Admission is completely free.
Where Is the Barstow Harvey House?
The Barstow Harvey House is located at 685 North First Avenue, Barstow, California 92311, on the north side of the BNSF railroad tracks, directly beside the intermittent Mojave River. The address is sometimes cited as 681 North First Avenue; both direct travelers to the same building.
To reach the Harvey House from Interstate 15, take the Barstow Road (Highway 247) exit and head north. Follow Barstow Road as it descends toward Main Street, which is Route 66 itself through downtown Barstow. Turn left (west) on Main Street and continue through the historic downtown. Turn right (north) on First Avenue and cross the steel bridge that spans the BNSF rail yards below. The Harvey House is on the right immediately after the bridge. Free parking is available in the large lot adjacent to the building. The building’s orientation — facing the former rail platforms rather than the street — means the most dramatic approach is from the rail side, where the full arcade and colonnade facade is revealed.
Barstow sits at a major transportation crossroads: Interstate 15 (connecting Los Angeles to Las Vegas) and Interstate 40 (the former Route 66 alignment heading east) both pass through, making Barstow one of the busiest travel corridors in the California desert. For Route 66 travelers, Barstow sits midway through the California leg — about 60 miles east of San Bernardino and about 70 miles west of the Mojave ghost-town corridor through Newberry Springs, Ludlow, and Amboy.
Fred Harvey and the Harvey House System
The Problem That Fred Harvey Solved: 1876
Before Fred Harvey, eating while traveling by rail in the American West was a genuinely unpleasant experience. Trains stopped briefly at railroad stations while passengers scrambled off to find food, and what they typically found was bad: overpriced, poorly prepared meals served in grimy conditions, with no guarantee that the food was safe, fresh, or edible. The meal stop was often 20 minutes or less, barely enough time to eat even if the food was acceptable. For travelers making the transcontinental crossing on the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway, meals were a recurring problem on every leg of the journey.
Frederick Henry Harvey (1835–1901), a British-born businessman who had come to the United States as a teenager and eventually became a freight agent for the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad, saw the problem as an opportunity. In 1876, after being turned down by his own employer, he approached the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway (AT&SF) and proposed a partnership: the railway would build and maintain the restaurants and hotels, and Harvey and his company would manage them to a high standard. The oral agreement they reached became one of the most consequential hospitality arrangements in American history.
The Harvey House Standard and the Harvey Girls
What Fred Harvey brought to the AT&SF’s route was not merely competent food service but a genuine standard of quality and elegance that was startling in the context of its time and place. Harvey House restaurants served fresh, well-prepared food on fine china with silver flatware and Irish linen. The menus at Harvey House dining rooms were ambitious — multiple courses, quality ingredients, dishes that would have been at home in metropolitan restaurants. The cooking was supervised to consistent standards, the service was attentive, and the atmosphere was formal enough that the formal dining rooms required male patrons to wear dinner jackets (and kept a rack of loaner jackets available for those who arrived without one).
Central to the Harvey House operation was the Harvey Girl — a concept Harvey developed that was, for its era, a genuinely progressive employment model. Harvey recruited young, single women from across the country to work as waitresses in his establishments. The women were required to be unmarried (they signed contracts agreeing not to marry for a year), were paid a competitive wage, received housing and meals, wore a distinctive uniform (black dress, white apron, white bow), and were held to strict standards of professional conduct. The Harvey Girls became nationally celebrated figures — the women who, as the common expression went, “civilized the West” — and their story was famous enough to inspire the 1946 MGM musical The Harvey Girls starring Judy Garland, which further cemented the Harvey Girls’ place in American popular culture. An estimated 5,000 Harvey Girls worked across the Harvey House network during the system’s peak decades.
When Fred Harvey died in 1901, his company operated 47 restaurants, 15 hotels, and 30 dining cars across 12 states — the first national restaurant chain in United States history. The Fred Harvey Company continued operating for decades after his death under family and corporate management, eventually being sold to Amfac, Inc. in 1968 and later becoming part of Xanterra Parks and Resorts, which still operates classic Harvey-era properties including El Tovar at the Grand Canyon.
The Casa del Desierto: The Harvey House Crown Jewel in California
Among the roughly 84 Harvey Houses built along the AT&SF’s network, the Casa del Desierto in Barstow was considered one of the flagship establishments — a “crown jewel” of the entire system, as the California Historic Route 66 Association has described it, representing the Harvey Company’s highest ambitions for its California presence. Barstow was the fourth Harvey House built on the AT&SF’s right-of-way — and its position as the division point where the Los Angeles–San Diego line split from the Bakersfield–San Francisco line made it one of the busiest passenger railroad hubs in the Southwest. Every transcontinental traveler on the AT&SF’s mainline between Chicago and California passed through Barstow. The Casa del Desierto was built to serve them at the highest possible standard.
The Architecture: Spanish Renaissance Elegance in the Mojave
The 1885 Original and the 1908 Fire
The building that stands today replaced an earlier one. The first AT&SF depot and hotel in Barstow was a wooden structure built in 1885 — functional but modest, and entirely unsuited to the Harvey Company’s ambitions for a premier California facility. In 1908, the wooden building burned down. The fire was part of a broader pattern of infrastructural challenges in Barstow at the time: the Mojave River’s periodic flooding had also created problems that required the AT&SF to undertake significant realignments of tracks and adjustments to the local grade. The combination of fire and flood damage gave the railway and the Harvey Company the opportunity to build the landmark facility they had envisioned — one that would represent the AT&SF and Fred Harvey at their finest.
Francis W. Wilson’s Design: 1910–1911
The architect credited by the Historic American Buildings Survey of the National Park Service is Francis W. Wilson of Santa Barbara, California — a designer who had already proven himself in the Harvey House context with his earlier designs for the El Garces Hotel and Depot in Needles (1908) and the Fray Marcos Hotel and Grand Canyon Depot (1909–1910). Wilson was also the designer of the Southern Pacific Railroad Passenger Station in Santa Barbara (1902), which bears a striking resemblance to the Casa del Desierto in its use of arcades and red tile roofs — a connection that helps confirm Wilson’s authorship of the Barstow building.
(Some sources, including the City of Barstow’s own historical materials, attribute the design to Mary Colter, the legendary Fred Harvey Company architect who created iconic structures at the Grand Canyon and elsewhere. However, architectural historians who have studied the building in depth have generally concluded that the Casa del Desierto shows little of Colter’s characteristic organic and natural-materials approach, and that its concrete-and-brick construction is more consistent with Wilson’s documented work. The credit question remains a point of discussion in architectural history, but Wilson is the name that appears in the official National Park Service documentation.)
The Building: Red Brick, Arcades, Towers, and Barrel Tiles
The Casa del Desierto is a synthesis of Spanish Renaissance and Classical Revival architectural styles, with what architectural observers have consistently described as a Moorish quality in its overall composition. The building’s structure is a concrete frame faced with red tapestry brick and beige artificial stone — materials chosen for their visual richness and their capacity to withstand the Mojave Desert’s extreme temperature swings. The roofline is covered in red clay barrel tiles, the standard roofing material of the California Mission Revival and Spanish Colonial Revival traditions.
The most visually arresting elements of the facade are its majestic arcades and colonnades — covered walkways that line the building and provided shade from the desert sun for railroad passengers waiting for their trains. The practical function was essential: Barstow temperatures regularly exceed 100°F in summer, and shaded outdoor waiting space was not a luxury but a necessity for a facility handling the volume of passenger traffic the Harvey House was built to serve.
At the building’s corners and at the central projecting bay facing the tracks, towers capped with pointed roofs or painted domes create the building’s characteristic silhouette — the profile that makes the Harvey House immediately recognizable from across the rail yards and from the First Avenue bridge. The National Register of Historic Places calls it the finest remaining depot-hotel in California; for the architecture alone, that assessment is difficult to contest.
The Interior: Two Dining Rooms, the Grand Lobby, and the Kitchen
The interior of the Casa del Desierto was designed to process hundreds of travelers per hour during the peak of the railroad era. At the height of train travel popularity, a passenger train stopped every 30 minutes at one of eight platforms visible in front of the building. Passengers arriving from Chicago or heading east from California changed trains at Barstow, which functioned as a railroad hub analogous to a modern airport — the point at which west-bound travelers connected from the mainline to lines serving Los Angeles, San Diego, or San Francisco.
Entering the Harvey House through the main lobby, passengers had the choice of two dining rooms. The formal dining room — also known as the east-end ballroom — served breakfast, lunch, and dinner with full table service and the requirement that male diners wear dinner jackets. Loaner jackets were provided for patrons who arrived without one; service was declined to formally dressed men who refused to wear them. The menu in the formal dining room was genuinely ambitious: multiple courses, fresh ingredients, dishes that matched the standard of urban restaurants in Chicago or Los Angeles. The kitchen made its own ice cream and many other items that could not be shipped to the desert — an expression of the Harvey Company’s commitment to fresh-made quality at every facility.
The second dining room — the west-end dining room — was less formal and featured the signature Harvey House element: an enclosed semi-horseshoe shaped lunch counter seating 50 people, where Harvey Girls served hundreds of travelers per half-hour during the busiest periods. No jacket was required in the west-end room, making it accessible to travelers in practical road or work attire. Both dining rooms were served by a single large kitchen located directly behind the lobby — a logistical arrangement that allowed the Harvey operation’s characteristic speed and consistency.
The Casa del Desierto and Route 66
The relationship between the Barstow Harvey House and U.S. Route 66 is one of geographical adjacency and historical parallel. Route 66 was commissioned in November 1926 along the National Old Trails Highway alignment — a route that ran adjacent to the AT&SF’s mainline through Barstow, as it did for much of the California desert crossing. The Casa del Desierto, already 15 years old when Route 66 was designated, became a landmark alongside the new federal highway almost by accident of geography: the railroad corridor and the highway shared the same desert passage, and the Harvey House sat at the junction point where both modes of transportation converged in Barstow.
During the golden era of Route 66 travel — roughly the late 1930s through the late 1950s — Barstow’s position made it one of the busiest intersections in California highway travel. The junction of Route 66 and U.S. 91 (later incorporated into Interstate 15) was described by contemporaries as one of the busiest highway intersections in the country, with local gas stations reportedly dispensing more than 800 gallons of gasoline per day. The Harvey House served both the railroad travelers arriving on Santa Fe trains and the highway travelers arriving in automobiles — two transportation eras overlapping in the same Mojave Desert city.
The Casa del Desierto was also documented in the Green Book — the travel guide published annually from the 1930s through the 1960s that identified businesses where African American travelers would be welcomed and treated respectfully. The Harvey Company’s inclusion in the Green Book reflects Fred Harvey’s commitment to serving all travelers with the same standard — a policy that put the Harvey Houses ahead of much of American hospitality in matters of racial equality during the segregation era. For Route 66 travelers in the postwar decades, the Casa del Desierto’s presence in the Green Book made Barstow a known-safe stop on the California leg of the Mother Road.
The Building’s History: Grandeur, Decline, Earthquake, and Revival
Opening and the Peak Years: 1911–1940s
The Casa del Desierto opened on February 22, 1911, with the Harvey Girls in place from the first day of operation. The building quickly established itself as both the finest facility on the AT&SF’s California corridor and the social center of Barstow itself — the place where travelers paused, where locals celebrated, and where the railroad’s importance to the desert community was physically expressed. The building’s grand lobby, formal dining room, and ballroom made it a venue for the significant events of Barstow’s civic life as well as a railroad station.
The Santa Anita racetrack’s celebrity clientele and the growth of automobile travel along Route 66 through the 1920s and 1930s sustained the building’s importance even as pure railroad travel began to face competition from the automobile. During World War II, Harvey Houses across the network reopened or expanded to serve the enormous volume of military personnel traveling by troop trains across the country. Barstow’s strategic position — it sat near the U.S. Marine Corps Supply Depot and the Fort Irwin training center — made the Harvey House a critical wartime facility as well as a civilian one.
Decline and the San Francisco Crime Era: 1940s–1973
The postwar decades brought the familiar pattern of railroad decline. As automobile travel expanded and the Interstate Highway System’s construction began diverting traffic from the old highway corridors, and as airlines captured the long-distance travel market that had sustained transcontinental rail, the AT&SF’s passenger volumes fell. By 1943, records produced by photographer Jack Delano for the U.S. Farm Security Administration documented that the restaurant and public spaces of the depot were being used primarily by police and AT&SF employees rather than by the traveling public. The Harvey Girls who had fed hundreds of travelers per hour during the peak years were gone, and the elaborate dining room service had contracted to a shadow of its former self.
The Santa Fe Railway formally closed the Casa del Desierto station in 1973. (Some sources cite 1975 for the formal closure; the building was added to the National Register of Historic Places in April 1975, suggesting that the preservation designation and the closure of active Harvey House operations occurred in close proximity.) After closure, the building was stripped of many of its delicate fixtures and period furnishings by artifact thieves. Its unprotected condition over the following decade and a half made it the target of ongoing vandalism and deterioration — a pattern depressingly familiar for grand buildings that lose their original function before preservation efforts can intervene.
Landmark Designations and Earthquake Damage: 1975–1992
The Casa del Desierto was added to the National Register of Historic Places on April 3, 1975, and designated as California Historical Landmark No. 892 in 1976 — formal recognition of its architectural and historical significance that provided some protection against demolition but did not resolve the building’s deteriorating physical condition. The AT&SF had considered demolition; local protests and the landmark designations forestalled that outcome.
The 1992 Landers Earthquake — a magnitude 7.3 event centered about 50 miles from Barstow — struck the building with devastating force. The unreinforced brick towers were destroyed. Interior gypsum block walls collapsed. Most of the cast stone anchorage was lost. Large sections of the second-floor exterior walls fell away. The earthquake damage represented both a crisis and, ultimately, an opportunity: the City of Barstow had purchased the building from the railroad in 1990, and the earthquake created the conditions — and eventually the funding — for a comprehensive restoration.
The $8 Million Restoration and Rededication: 1990–1999
Beginning in the early 1990s with city ownership established, the restoration of the Casa del Desierto was funded through a combination of Federal Transportation Enhancement Funds and local contributions, totaling more than $8 million. The work required rebuilding the earthquake-destroyed towers, reconstructing collapsed exterior walls, restoring the facade’s arcades and ornamental elements, repairing the interior, and bringing the building’s infrastructure up to contemporary standards while preserving its historic character. The restoration was completed in stages, with the building rededicated in 1999 — a ceremony that returned a Barstow landmark to active civic life after more than 25 years of closure and deterioration.
The Museums Open: 2000–2001
The restoration’s first major institutional milestone was the opening of the Route 66 Mother Road Museum on July 4, 2000 — a date chosen with deliberate patriotic symbolism for a museum dedicated to the quintessential American highway. The Western America Railroad Museum followed on February 17, 2001, completing the building’s transformation from an abandoned railroad facility to one of the most content-rich visitor destinations in the California Mojave Desert.
The Two Museums: Route 66 and Railroad History Under One Roof
The Route 66 Mother Road Museum
The Route 66 Mother Road Museum occupies the north wing of the building and is dedicated to the history, culture, and visual heritage of U.S. Route 66 and the Mojave Desert communities the highway shaped. The museum’s collection includes historic photographs, artifacts, road signs, and personal memorabilia documenting the Route 66 experience from the highway’s commissioning in 1926 through its decommissioning in 1985 and into the contemporary preservation movement that has brought renewed attention to the Mother Road in the years approaching the Route 66 Centennial in 2026.
The museum’s exhibits follow the arc of Route 66’s history: the early highway era of the 1920s and 1930s, the Dust Bowl migration that gave the road its identity as the “Road of Flight”, the wartime years, the postwar boom of American car culture and roadside tourism, and the long decline that followed the construction of the Interstate Highway System. Barstow’s specific role on Route 66 — as a major desert junction where the Mother Road intersected with U.S. 91 and where the highway was at its busiest during the mid-century decades — is documented with local specificity. Free handouts covering Route 66 history and nearby attractions are available; the museum’s docents are knowledgeable about both the exhibits and the driving route.
The Western America Railroad Museum
The Western America Railroad Museum occupies the east wing of the Casa del Desierto and extends into the outdoor area adjacent to the building, where retired railroad rolling stock — historic locomotives, passenger cars, cabooses, and section cars — is displayed in the open air beside the active BNSF tracks. Inside, the museum holds an extensive collection of railroad memorabilia, photographs, maps, artifacts, and archives related to the AT&SF and the broader history of railroads in the American West. Items from the Harvey House operation itself — dining room pieces, menus, Harvey Girl uniforms, period furnishings — are among the most significant holdings in the collection.
The outdoor exhibits are among the museum’s most dramatic: positioned beside working railroad tracks that continue to carry BNSF freight traffic on the Southern Transcon mainline, the retired rolling stock provides a tangible connection to the era of steam-powered railroad travel that the Casa del Desierto was built to serve. The sight of a modern BNSF intermodal freight train passing at highway speed beside a historic steam locomotive on static display compresses a century of American transportation history into a single visual frame.
What to Do at the Barstow Harvey House Today
Explore the Historic Building
The Casa del Desierto’s restored lobby, arcades, and common areas are accessible during the building’s open hours. The scale of the interior — particularly the formal dining room and east-end ballroom — is striking: this was a space built to accommodate the formal dining ambitions of the Fred Harvey Company at its peak, and even with the room’s current institutional uses, the architectural volume and quality of the space are evident. The building also houses city offices and the NASA Goldstone Visitor Center on its upper floors, which have been adapted from the original hotel rooms. The front desk is staffed with knowledgeable volunteers who serve as informal tour guides, providing context and history to visitors who ask.
Visit Both Museums
The combination of the Route 66 Mother Road Museum and the Western America Railroad Museum — housed in the same building, both free to enter, both open on the same days — makes the Harvey House the most comprehensive Route 66 and railroad history destination in the California desert. Plan for a minimum of one to two hours to explore both museums thoroughly. The outdoor railroad collection can extend that visit significantly for rail enthusiasts.
Catch an Amtrak Train
The Casa del Desierto is an active Amtrak station — one of only a handful of historic Harvey Houses still serving that function. Amtrak’s Southwest Chief, which runs the Chicago–Los Angeles route that traces much of the old AT&SF mainline (and runs parallel to Route 66 for much of its length), stops at Barstow. For travelers seeking the modern equivalent of the transcontinental railroad journey that the Harvey House was built to serve, a Southwest Chief stop at the Casa del Desierto connects the building’s original purpose directly to the present. As of 2024, Amtrak is planning platform accessibility improvements for the Barstow station by FY2026.
Ghost Tours and Special Events
The Harvey House offers ghost tours exploring the building’s reputed paranormal activity — a reputation that has grown from the genuine human dramas of over a century of operation, including the wartime years, the peak years of the Harvey Girls’ service, and the long period of abandonment before restoration. The ghost tours are available periodically; check barstowharveyhouse.com for current schedules. The building’s ballroom is also available for private events.
Photography
The Casa del Desierto is one of the most photogenic buildings in the California desert. The building’s railroad-facing facade — the arcaded colonnade with its towers and domes — is best photographed in morning light when the eastern-facing surfaces are directly lit. The outdoor railroad collection alongside the active BNSF tracks provides dramatic compositions, particularly when freight trains pass. The steel bridge on First Avenue offers an elevated perspective on the building’s overall massing against the desert landscape. At sunset, the building’s warm brick tones and the surrounding desert light combine to produce images that capture the quality that made the Harvey Company choose this location for its California flagship.
Practical Information for Your Visit
Address: 685 North First Avenue, Barstow, California 92311
Phone: (760) 255-1890 (Barstow Area Chamber of Commerce in the building)
Websites: barstowharveyhouse.com | barstowca.org
Admission: Free. Donations support the museums’ operations.
Building Hours: Monday through Friday, 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Saturday 10:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. Closed Sunday.
Museum Hours: Route 66 Mother Road Museum open Friday, Saturday, and Sunday 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. Western America Railroad Museum open Friday, Saturday, and Sunday 11:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. Museum hours may vary; confirm before visiting.
Best Visit Days: Friday or Saturday, when both museums and the Harvey House lobby are all open simultaneously.
Parking: Free, large lot adjacent to the building. Accessible parking available.
Accessibility: The building is accessible. Amtrak is undertaking platform accessibility improvements by FY2026.
Time Required: Allow 1–2 hours minimum for both museums and the building tour. Rail enthusiasts may spend considerably longer with the outdoor collection.
Weather Note: Barstow is in the Mojave Desert. Summer temperatures regularly exceed 105°F. The Harvey House is air-conditioned inside; visit in the cooler morning hours if exploring during summer. Spring and fall are the most comfortable visiting seasons.
Nearby Route 66 Highlights Along California’s Desert Corridor
Route 66 in California — Complete Guide — The full overview of California’s 314-mile Route 66 corridor from Needles on the Arizona border through Barstow, Victorville, San Bernardino, and Los Angeles to the Santa Monica Pier.
Roy’s Motel and Café, Amboy, California — Approximately 80 miles east of Barstow via Newberry Springs and Ludlow on National Trails Highway (Historic Route 66). The 50-foot Googie neon sign, restored in 2019, is the single most photographed landmark on California’s Route 66 desert corridor.
California Route 66 Museum, Victorville — About 35 miles south of Barstow on I-15, the California Route 66 Museum in Victorville’s Old Town is a free, interactive Route 66 museum housed in the historic Red Rooster Café on D Street — Route 66 itself.
The Wigwam Motel, San Bernardino — About 60 miles southwest of Barstow via I-15, the iconic Wigwam Motel in San Bernardino has offered teepee-shaped rooms to Route 66 travelers since 1950. A California Historic Place and a Route 66 essential.
Route 66 in San Bernardino, California — The Original McDonald’s Museum site, the Wigwam Motel, and the full Route 66 heritage of one of California’s most historically significant Route 66 cities.
Route 66 Centennial 2026 — The 100th anniversary of Route 66 is November 11, 2026. The Harvey House’s Route 66 Mother Road Museum opened on July 4, 2000 and will be an active part of Centennial year celebrations. Check this page for California events.
Route 66 — Complete Guide — The definitive guide to all 2,448 miles of America’s Mother Road, from the Begin sign in Chicago, Illinois, to the End of the Trail at the Santa Monica Pier.
