The subtitle of this book is “How Visionary Businessman Fred Harvey Built a Railroad Hospitality Empire That Civilized the Wild West”. While I had heard of Fred Harvey, and about the “Harvey Girl” movie starring Judy Garland, I didn’t realize the impact these restaurants had on the country. The person Fred Harvey was an Englishman who emigrated to the United States in the 1850’s, and worked himself up to owning one of the first “fast food” chains in history. The company “Fred Harvey” encompassed not only restaurants, but eventually bookstores, hotels, tour guides, and meal service on trains. The company outlived the man, and was managed by his descendants for several generations.
The first part of this book I found fascinating. It describes the beginning of the Fred Harvey empire, and how they started out just serving meals to train passengers at railway depots in the Western part of the United States. That may not sound impressive, until you remember that in the years after the Civil War, and before the interstate highway system, train travel was the main way most Americans got to different parts of the country. Fred allied his restaurant company with the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe railroad, and the destinies of the two companies were intertwined. The book does a great job of describing what a train trip in this era would have been like, and even has an appendix with favorite recipes from several of the best known chefs. Because Fred Harvey didn’t just hire cooks; he hired European trained chefs from well-known restaurants. A Fred Harvey meal was an experience.
Fred Harvey is credited with civilizing the West. That is because in order to staff his restaurants, he brought in young women from other parts of the county. At that time, in many of these towns, the men greatly outnumbered the other women there. These “Harvey Girls” were required to maintain a high standard of dress when they were on duty, and lived in company provided chaperoned dormitories when they were off duty. They also had to sign an agreement to stay in whatever whistle-stop town they were assigned to for at least six months, at which point they could take a vacation with a train pass on the Santa Fe, and then could sign up for another six months. Many young women took advantage of this job to not only move west, but also to find a husband, either in the town, or on the railroad.
If this was your family, how would you research them? One thing I found interesting is that the author used several common sources of genealogical information in his research, including censuses and tax lists. For example, he thinks the date usually given for Fred’s emigration is off by a couple of years, based on English censuses and tax lists. He also interviewed as many descendants and relatives of the Harvey family as he could. As far as researching our own families, if you have a female relative who according to the census seems to be living in a boarding house with a lot of waitresses, you might have a Harvey Girl in your tree. In fact, if a female relative seems to be transported to a western state, with the rest of her family staying put, you should probably check a local directory, both to see where she was living, and to see if there was a Fred Harvey’s in town.