Fred Harvey was also the most important driving force in the early appreciation and preservation—and, to some, exploitation—of Native American arts and culture. Most of the Indian art and crafts now on display in the world’s major museums were originally owned by Fred Harvey. And much of the silver and turquoise jewelry that we think of as indigenous was commissioned, and in some cases even designed, by the Fred Harvey company to sell in its myriad gift shops. Fred Harvey was also the first company to embrace Native American and Spanish-American imagery in architecture and design, inventing what is now known as “Santa Fe style.” Many of the best-known paintings and photos, and much of the best writing about the Southwest and the West, were originally commissioned or enabled by Fred Harvey.
The restaurants and hotels run by this transplanted Londoner and his son did more than just revolutionize American dining and service. They became a driving force in helping the United States shed its envy of European society and begin to appreciate and even romanticize its own culture.
“More than any single organization, the Fred Harvey System introduced America to Americans,” wrote a historian in the 1950s.
And it’s just as true today. Because, whether we know it or not, we still live in Fred Harvey’s America.
ATLANTIC & PACIFIC TRAIN, CROSSING THE CANYON DIABLO BRIDGE IN NORTHERN ARIZONA BETWEEN WILLIAMS AND WINSLOW, NOT LONG AFTER FRED HARVEY TOOK OVER ALL THE EATING HOUSES ON THIS SANTA FE SUBSIDIARY IN 1887, EXTENDING HIS CHAIN TO CALIFORNIA; INSET, FRED HARVEY, 1863 PORTRAIT
CHAPTER 1
POT WALLOPER
WHEN PEOPLE WONDERED WHERE ALL HIS PASSIONATE AMBITION came from, Fred Harvey never mentioned his father’s failure.
But he never forgot being eight years old, in the muggy midsummer of 1843, when the legal notice appeared in the Times of London. His father, Charles, a struggling thirty-two-year-old Soho tailor, was being called before the Bankruptcy Court on Basinghall Street—a grand Victorian building where the undoing of businessmen’s lives had become public entertainment for those who couldn’t afford tickets to the theater or the serialized novels of young Charles Dickens.
On July 12 at 11:00 a.m., Charles Harvey appeared before Mr. Commissioner Evans, the senior judge. He was preceded by Samuel Polack, a Newport woolen draper, and waiting to see the judge after him was Abraham Harris, a slop seller in Tower Hill. Luckily, Fred’s father was merely declared “insolvent,” so his creditors could pick over only what he had earned and bought in his thirty-two years. If he had been declared “bankrupt,” all his future earnings would have been garnisheed as well.
While the difference meant a great deal to his father, the shame was the same for Fred Harvey, his mother, Ann, and his two younger sisters, Eliza and Annie. The Harveys were officially paupers. They had never been rich, living in rented flats first on Great Marylebone Street in London’s West End—an enclave of merchants and craftsmen near All Souls Church, where Fred was baptized—and then in a similarly hardscrabble section of Soho, at 16 Lisle Street. But they had always gotten by. Now they had to start over financially, and the strain on his parents’ marriage was apparently too great. According to family lore, his mother periodically ran off “with a coachman,” and by the time Fred was a teenager, he appears to have been living with his widowed Aunt Mary on Tottenham High Street. Mary Harvey had her own business and did well enough to have a servant to help with her three children.
Fred would later tell family, friends, and journalists that he left his homeland for America in 1850 at the age of fifteen. It was a good story with a nice round year, but the March 1851 London census shows him still living with his Aunt Mary. It appears he actually sailed to New York when he was seventeen, in the late spring of 1853. He told a colleague he left to avoid being drafted, as Great Britain was already fighting in Burma and was about to join the Crimean War. But, like many Londoners who came to New York that year, he was also seeking opportunity.
New York was holding the first world’s fair on U.S. soil, the Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations. It was an Americanized version of the first world’s fair anywhere, London’s Crystal Palace Exhibition, which had drawn over six million visitors to the 990,000-square-foot exhibition hall in Hyde Park in 1851. New York decided to build its own Crystal Palace on 42nd Street between Fifth and Sixth avenues, in what is now Bryant Park, and was expecting a similar rush of tourists. On Fred’s voyage, many of the first-class passengers were coming to see New York’s Crystal Palace. Fred and his mates down in steerage simply hoped the world’s fair would improve their chances of finding good jobs.
With only two pounds in his pocket, Fred began looking for work the moment he disembarked. Steamships from Europe moored at the Hudson River piers on the lower west side of Manhattan, as did the ferries from New Jersey. And just across from the pier was the Washington Street Market, the largest meat and produce market in America, offering provisions from farms hundreds of miles away, as well as those still operating in Manhattan, on the verdant land that would become Central Park.
The Washington Street Market reeked of everything, from freshly butchered animals and just-plucked vegetables to the overripe aromas of garbage—especially the heaps of shells from New York’s favorite fast food, oysters. A two-story, block-long horn of plenty, with rows of dangling carcasses reaching all the way to the high ceilings, it served as the fresh-food mecca for New York’s housewives, private cooks, and professional chefs alike.
And for those who worked in the food business, there was only one place to eat in the market: Smith & McNell’s restaurant at Fulton and Washington, whose owners used the market as their larder and refrigerator. Originally a “coffee and cake” shop, Smith & McNell’s had recently expanded into one of the most reasonably priced full-service restaurants in New York, open twenty-four hours and offering the best of the day’s harvest, catch, and slaughter, prepared without adornment. Meals ended with every man’s digestive pleasure—the best cigar he could afford.
Fred Harvey likely ate his first American meal at Smith & McNell’s, as did so many others who entered New York at the Hudson River piers. And soon he was working there, starting at the bottom as a “pot walloper”—a dishwasher. He learned the restaurant business from Henry Smith and Tom McNell, who had strong ideas about fresh ingredients, handshake relationships, and the redemptive power of cash. Smith and McNell were legendary in the market for their quirky business practices. They refused to keep written records of any sort, and they did not believe in credit. At the end of each day, they settled their accounts and divided their profits.
There was a lot to learn at Smith & McNell’s because it was really two restaurants: On the bustling main floor, you could get a hearty, filling meal for fifteen cents ($4.31)* while upstairs was a fancier dining room for wealthier patrons expecting prime cuts and a more refined gustatory experience. Some customers never aspired to eat upstairs: Long after he became a celebrated scientist, Thomas Edison would bring business associates to Smith & McNell’s main floor for the deeply comforting apple dumplings and strong, fresh-brewed coffee, which had once been all he could afford.
Young Fred Harvey had chosen an ideal time and location for his culinary education. The American restaurant business was not even a quarter century old; it had been born just fifteen blocks across town from Smith & McNell’s, on the other side of the financial district. There, in 1830, the legendary Delmonico’s morphed from just another coffee and pastry shop into the first full-service restaurant in the United States. New York, like other major American cities, had always had hotels that fed their guests from a set menu, as well as oyster bars, coffeehouses, and carts for quick, modest fare. But the idea of eating in a full-service restaurant—where patrons could order what they wanted from a broad and varied menu, à la carte—was still novel.
Restaurants had existed in France for some time, but in British culture, which still heavily influenced life in America, dining in a public place was considered uncivilized, gauche. The success
of Delmonico’s in the 1830s heralded a new chapter in American dining. With its authentic French cuisine and choice American beef—all served with its signature potatoes, grated into long strands and then oven baked with butter, Parmesan, and a touch of nutmeg—Delmonico’s became the country’s gold standard for dining out.
Fred spent eighteen months in New York, working his way up at Smith & McNell’s from pot walloper to busboy, waiter, and line cook, while soaking up the trends of the country’s most delectable city. During that time, he learned that his mother, Ann, had contracted tuberculosis. Since he couldn’t afford to go back to visit her in England, he decided to have a portrait made so she could at least see he was doing well. He went to the Spread Eagle Daguerreian Gallery on Chatham Square, where photography innovator R. A. Lewis captured the earliest known image of him. In the daguerreotype, Fred’s hair is dark, longish, and wavy; he sports the first of many styles of facial hair to come, this one a beard that extends sideburn to sideburn under his chin without ever encroaching on his slightly chubby face. He has a warm, reassuring smile, and his eyes are wide, as if mesmerized by all he is seeing around him in New York.
FRED’S MOTHER HELD on for six months in a sanitarium in Wolverhampton, before dying in August 1855 at the age of forty-eight. Not long after her death, he sailed for New Orleans, the culinary capital of the South. As soon as he arrived, he knew it wasn’t for him. He was “concerned about trying to make a living, which was difficult in New Orleans, and he was appalled by the slavery that surrounded him on all sides,” his great-grandson recalled being told. “He also became convinced there would be a war between the states, and he wasn’t at all interested in serving in a ‘Southern army’—especially after avoiding service in his own country.”
Soon after, he headed up the Mississippi to St. Louis—where they were still at least debating the issue of slavery—and got a job in the bustling, smoky business district adjacent to the piers on the river’s western bank. He worked at the Butterfield House, where the hotel’s owner, Abner Hitchcock, became his friend and mentor—and later his sponsor when he applied to become a U.S. citizen. On July 27, 1858, Hitchcock served as a witness when twenty-three-year-old Fred Harvey took the oath renouncing his allegiance to Queen Victoria and declaring his loyalty to the United States and its Constitution.
Fred soon struck out on his own, taking over the Merchants Dining Saloon and Restaurant at 10 Chestnut Street. It was a plain three-story building just a half block from the docks, not far from the original Anheuser brewery—Busch hadn’t yet married into the first family of American beer—and the house where young Samuel Clemens stayed with his brother when he came off the river. (Today, the location is almost directly under the famed St. Louis Gateway Arch.) He had a partner in the business, William Doyle, a thirty-eight-year-old Irish immigrant, who ran the saloon while Fred concentrated on the dining room. The Merchants Dining Saloon, reportedly quite popular, was on the first floor, and Fred lived upstairs in one of the twenty-four rooms that were rented out to travelers, transients, and his own staff. Doyle, his wife, and their four children lived next door.
At that time, St. Louis was the North of the South, the South of the North, the West of the East, and the East of the West, in every way a microcosm of where the country had been and where it was going. And Fred’s restaurant was right in the center of it all. Next door was the city’s main telegraph office, where every piece of news first arrived. Across the street was the local headquarters of the Republican Party, which opposed slavery. Right around the corner were several slave traders, with a large sign out front that read, “Negroes Bought Here.”
Within a year, Fred had done well enough to let his partner, Doyle, and cook Dickson Brown run the restaurant while he visited England. He sailed from New York on the steamship Africa in October 1859, and when he returned several weeks later, he brought his father and his younger sister Eliza with him.
Fred also came back with a wife—a blond Dutch woman in her mid-twenties named Ann, about whom little is known. The whole family lived in the rooms above the restaurant. Fred’s father visited for just a few weeks, but Eliza decided to stay, after meeting another recent British immigrant, bookkeeper Henry Bradley, whom she soon married.
Fred and Ann found out they were going to be parents in the summer of 1860. While business was still strong, Abraham Lincoln had just been nominated by the Republican Party, and tensions between North and South were rising before Fred’s eyes. St. Louis, a key border city, was as far south as Lincoln’s supporters ever campaigned.
By the time Ann gave birth in late February 1861, and Fred was able to hold their son, Eddie, in his arms, America was a different place. While Lincoln was in Washington being sworn in as president, a convention was meeting a few blocks from Fred’s restaurant to decide whether Missouri would secede from the United States. It was a crucial decision, because control of St. Louis and its arsenal could mean control of the Mississippi River. When the convention voted not to leave the Union, Missouri’s defiant secessionist governor set up his own Confederate military camp in the north of the city.
Fred’s prosperous business lasted only a few more weeks. It effectively ended, like so much of normal life in St. Louis, on May 10, the day of the infamous St. Louis Massacre. After Union troops bloodlessly captured the governor’s camp, hundreds of civilians gathered to watch the men of the vanquished pro-secession militia being led through town. When a skirmish broke out between Union soldiers and taunting onlookers, the troops panicked, firing into the crowd in front of Fire Co. #;5 and killing twenty-eight civilians, including women and children. There was a brief truce after the incident, but it fell apart just weeks later; Union leaders took control, and Governor Jackson fled, calling for fifty thousand men to defend the city against Lincoln’s troops.
By then, Fred Harvey had come to see himself, first and foremost, as a businessman—politics, like religion, was important but too divisive, bad for business. When asked for his political views, he was known to chuckle and say, “I’m for whoever wins.” But he could not remain neutral on the subject of slavery, which he felt was wrong. He got into a violent argument with his partner, who was a Confederate sympathizer, and, not long after, discovered that Doyle had run off to join the secessionist army. He took with him every penny the two men had saved, over $1,300 ($32,774).
In reality, the Merchants Dining Saloon and Restaurant was probably doomed anyway. Martial law was declared in St. Louis, and steamboat traffic from the South on the Mississippi was severely restricted. No business that relied on river travelers could survive.
By the summer of 1861, Fred Harvey found himself a penniless twenty-six-year-old with a wife and baby to support. Not only had he become his father, but he had lost everything at a younger age. And in St. Louis, the city that had embraced him for five years and where he became an American, he suddenly felt like the ultimate outsider—a Yankee and a foreigner.
* All dollar amounts in this book are followed in parentheses by their approximate value today. These figures are based on consumer price index comparisons using the handy “MeasuringWorth calculator” developed by economists from the University of Illinois at Chicago and Miami University.
CHAPTER 2
THE LAST TRAIN STOP IN AMERICA
BEFORE FRED LOST HIS RESTAURANT, ONE OF HIS FAVORITE regular customers was Captain Rufus Ford, a veteran boatman who lived upriver in Quincy, Illinois, but often stopped in during his regular runs between St. Louis and St. Paul. Ford had become successful in the 1850s skippering “packet boats”—regularly scheduled steamships carrying people, goods, and mail—on the upper Mississippi. During his years as captain of the lavish one-hundred-berth ship the Die Vernon, he held the record for the fastest trip between St. Louis and St. Paul making all stops: only eighty-four hours.
Now in his late forties, Captain Ford had been telling Fred about the company he had recently started—a packet boat business farther west, on the other side of the state. The
re was a new railroad across the northern part of Missouri, connecting the eastern border at Hannibal to the small, bustling western river town of St. Joseph. The owners of the new Hannibal & St. Joseph Railroad had hired Ford to set up a packet boat service along the untamed Missouri River—allowing people and goods to cross, continuing on to Omaha and points farther west.
At the time, nobody could have imagined what a valuable route it would soon become. But then came the prospect of war, which brought railroad construction around the country to a screeching halt, leaving the East fairly well served from the Atlantic Ocean to just beyond the Mississippi, but nothing else in North America except a handful of small, isolated railroads in California, Oregon, and Texas. Suddenly the H& SJ—nicknamed the “Horrible & Slow-Jolting” for its rickety tracks and frequent derailments—mattered far beyond Missouri. And little “St. Joe,” as locals called the town, was now the end of the line: the last train stop in America, the westernmost point on the entire eastern railroad system.
So the town quickly became famous nationwide for a burgeoning new industry: the mail.
The U.S. government made St. Joe the hub for the entire nation’s transcontinental mail—which, after being sorted there, headed farther west on stagecoaches or packet boats. The city was also the end point for the Western Union wires from the East, which is why, in April 1860, it became home to the fabled Pony Express. St. Joe was the starting gate for the mad tag-team gallop to the West Coast by riders who responded to ads calling for “young, skinny, wiry fellows not over 18; must be expert riders willing to risk death daily; orphans preferred.”
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