# @downinnadesert on Instagram

- **Type:** Image
- **Original URL:** https://www.instagram.com/p/DdZj9s8j4Hk
- **Gondola URL:** https://gondola.cc/posts/70597302-downinnadesert-instagram
- **Thumbnail:** https://img.gondola.cc/tr:w-,h-,fo-auto/postThumbnails/7801493849.jpg
- **Posted:** 2026-09-17T19:00:24.000+00:00
- **Account Owner:** Down In The Desert🌵 (@downinnadesert) — https://gondola.cc/downinnadesert

## Caption

Around 100,000 women signed contracts to come west and work the railroad restaurants, and one of the terms was that they would not get married.

Fred Harvey ran the eating houses along the Santa Fe line starting in the 1870s. Before dining cars existed, a train stopped every few hours and passengers had about twenty minutes to eat. What was available near the tracks was mostly bad food served badly.

Harvey fixed that. And starting in 1883 he staffed it with women, because he did not think the men he was hiring could hold his standard.

The ads ran in eastern and midwestern papers looking for young women between 18 and 30, of good character, educated through the eighth grade. Wages, plus room and meals.

What they signed up for was a six month contract. Twelve hour shifts, six days a week. Living in a dormitory with a house matron and a curfew. And an agreement to stay unmarried for the length of the contract.

For a lot of these women it was the first time they had been more than fifty miles from where they grew up.

Arizona was full of them. Harvey restaurants at Holbrook, Winslow, Williams, Ash Fork, Seligman and Kingman. Then the hotels came. El Tovar opened on the South Rim in 1905. The Escalante at Ash Fork. The Havasu at Seligman, nineteen rooms. The Fray Marcos at Williams. La Posada at Winslow.

Winslow alone had three Harvey Houses.

Phoenix never got one. The depot here had a Harvey newsstand and that was it.

When contracts ended, a lot of them did not go home. Tens of thousands married railroad men, ranchers and miners and stayed in these towns, and they became a big part of why places like Winslow and Williams and Ash Fork became actual communities instead of just stops.

One thing that usually gets left out of this story. The National Park Service states on its own website that Fred Harvey almost always hired white women. Black women were not hired as Harvey Girls. Very few Hispanic or Native women ever were, until the war changed the labor market.

The last Arizona Harvey House hotel, La Posada, closed in 1957.

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#HarveyGirls #LaPosada #Winslow #ArizonaNews #DownInnaDesert

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## Tags

laposada, downinnadesert, arizonanews, harveygirls, winslow

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