Slaton Railroad Heritage Association

SLATON HARVEY HOUSE

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Fast Service, Spectacular Food and Harvey Girls, Too

(reprinted from the July 30, 1992, issue of the Slaton Slatonite)

It operated in Slaton for the city's first thirty years, and has been gone now for over fifty. But the memory and the mystique of The Harvey House and those Harvey Girls live on.  Fred Harvey began building a successful chain of restaurants and hotels along the Santa Fe passenger line in 1876, after a verbal agreement with the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe. Harvey had a commitment to the business philosophy of doing everything first class, and he held to that standard in his drive to bring sorely needed food service to the country’s rail travelers.

(click on photos to enlarge)

photos from the collection of the Slaton Railroad Heritage Association
Above top:  Harvey House in Slaton, Texas soon after completion in 1912 (Santa Fe photo).  The structures reportedly cost $75,000 to build.  Both buildings are still standing today, the smokehouse sans its smokestack. Above left:  Interior view of the Slaton Harvey House lunch counter and newsstand.  Date on magazine shows 1933. Above right:  Recent view of Slaton Harvey House, just prior to the beginning of restoration work.

Harvey, an European emigrant of Scottish descent, had ridden on America's passenger trains, and had even worked for two railroad companies. He knew that passengers were hard pressed to find decent food on their journeys.  Prior to his railroad experience, Harvey had learned the restaurant business from the ground up in New York and New Orleans, but his idea for depot restaurants was turned down by the Burlington Railroad before he approached the Santa Fe.

In the agreement, the Santa Fe shared the building costs and gave Harvey space on their trains for moving his food, equipment and supplies. Wayne Lamb, who worked in Slaton’s Harvey House from 1938 until it closed in 1942, remembers Cokes and milk were shipped on the train in wooden crates from Kansas.

The Harvey House focus was to increase Santa Fe ridership by offering high quality food at reasonable prices for the train traveler. The business generated from the area residents was considered icing on the cake.  When Fred Harvey died in 1901, his idea had grown to 15 hotels, 47 restaurants, and 30 dining car operations along the Santa Fe line.

Harvey Girls

As the railroad pushed out into the pioneer American West, Harvey could not count on the ability to recruit his staff from the Harvey House locations. In many cases, like Slaton, the city was in its infancy. The West was not conducive to attracting the type of young ladies that Fred Harvey wanted to hire to serve in his restaurants.

Harvey placed ads in Eastern and Midwestern newspapers that read:   "Wanted, young women of good character, attractive and intelligent,18 to 30."  Harvey Girls were trained to high standards of prompt and courteous service. They were the key to serving hundreds of passengers in about 20 minutes...the average length of time a train would need for servicing every four hours.

Harvey Girls all wore the same uniform, a long-sleeved black dress with a stiff "Elsie" collar, black shoes and stockings. The company furnished a full white wrap-around apron that was so stiffly starched that it had to be pinned to a corset, longtime Slaton resident and former Harvey Girl Cleo Wolf remembers.  The girls were closely supervised by their manager (or manager’s wife), and curfews were strictly enforced in the early years. They worked very hard and their eight-hour-a-day shifts were often split to conform to train schedules.

In the late 1800s, Harvey Girls earned $17.50 per month plus tips, room, board, and train passes. The company furnished and cleaned their aprons. Bert Polk held a variety of jobs in Slaton’s Harvey House through most of the '30s, and he recalls loading and unloading many bundles of aprons and linens. He said the company laundry was located in Albuquerque.

When the Harvey Girls were recruited in the early years, they were asked not to marry for at least a year. It has been estimated that more than 5,000 women married and settled in the West, as a result of Harvey Houses.

The combination of good food served in a fine dining atmosphere with imported linen, china and silver created a distinctive contrast to the typical eating establishments in turn-of-the-century small town Texas. And the hope of catching the eye of one of the Harvey Girls no doubt kept many a poor farmer, rancher, and railroader coming back to dine again and again.  As the mystique of the Harvey Girl grew, a songwriter of the era, S. .E. Kiser, penned a verse in their honor:

"Oh, the pretty Harvey Girl beside my chair,

A fairer maiden I shall never see,

She was winsome, she was neat,

she was gloriously sweet,

And she certainly was very good to me."

Will Rogers was reported to have added that. "Fred Harvey kept the West in food and wives."

Slaton’s Harvey House

The building purchased this week by the Slaton Railroad Heritage Association was built as a Harvey House in 1912 for a reported $75,000.  The restaurant seated 48 people around a large horseshoe-shaped counter. Also on the ground floor was the kitchen, bakery, and a newsstand and gift shop.  The second floor consisted of living quarters for the manager and his family, and bedrooms for the single employees.

One of the reasons for the Harvey Houses’ success was their ability to serve fresh, high quality meat, seafood, and produce at remote locations across the Soutwest.   Trains would deliver beef from Kansas City; seafood and produce from southern California year around.

(click on photo to enlarge)

photos from the collection of the Slaton Railroad Heritage Association

Slaton Harvey House employees, from left to right, Donald Polk, Wayne Lamb (back), Hermein Kahlich (the Harvey House girl) and Ira McCarver (white hat), in 1939.

Slaton's Harvey House was the finest restaurant in the area for many years, and residents of the surrounding towns ate along side all manner of Santa Fe passenegers.   Slaton Harvey House girl Rose Farschon served the great boxing champion Max Baer in the late 30s.  Slaton pioneers still remember the Harvey House's beauty and quality of food and service, though most could rarely afford to eat there. Railroad employees were able to eat at half price, and though full meals were served for about a dollar a commonly repeated memory was, "Nobody had any money back then."

The local Harvey House opened after Fred Harvey died, and its operations reflected accommodations to the times. Gone was the traditional Harvey House requirement that all male diners wear jackets, and the starting salary for Slaton Harvey Girls had worked its way up to a dollar a day, plus tips.  Slatonites who worked for the Fred Harvey company remember their years there with fondness. They agreed that though they had to work hard it was a good company to work for, and that their supervisors were not too strict.

One story had it that the storage basement was utilized by the Harvey Girls for learning to roller skate, while one of the cooks remembers its use for a clandestine beer-making operation.  Wayne Lamb was working in the kitchen during its last years of operation, and recalls the troop trains that were fed here. He said, 'The company sent waitresses from Chicago to help handle the troop trains, and those women were tough."

Harvey Service

Harvey House workers were able to handle large numbers of passengers in a short amount of time because the brakeman on the train would get menu preferences from the passengers and that information would be teletyped ahead to the Harvey House cooks.   When the train pulled into the station and the passengers began to get off the train, a Harvey House staffer would hit a brass gong which stood outside the entrance to the restaurant. This let passengers know instantly where to come, and the Harvey Girls were ready to serve them.

As she moved to each customer, the Harvey Girl would let the beverage filler behind her know what each diner's drink preference was by the way she placed the coffee cup in front of him. After taking orders verbally -Harvey Girls were not allowed to write them down- she would immediately repeat them to someone in the kitchen.

Hermein Kroll, a Slaton Harvey Girl in the late 1930s, pointed out that not only was the food ready to serve in just a few minutes, but that it was served on plates kept warm in a steamer. It was this type of attention to detail that distinguished the Harvey House.

During the 1930s, Harvey Houses were serving more than 15 million meals each year. Texas had 16 Harvey Houses. Area locations included Amarillo, Sweetwater and Clovis.  Like most Harvey Houses, the Slaton facility had a newsstand/gift shop adjacent to the diner, supplementing the usual printed material with an array of fine gifts, candies, Indian jewelry and weavings.  One Slatonite remembered her beau giving her a pair of satin panties from Slaton’s Harvey House gift shop. What made them most unusual was a small zipper on the side. (This was before zippers were commonly found on clothing.) The zipper was held in a closed position with a tiny working lock. Embroidered on one leg of the panties was, "NO, NO, A THOUSAND TlMES NO!"

Faster trains, growing automobile travel and increased restaurant competition began the demise of the Harvey Houses. The Slaton location closed in the early 1940s.  The building was converted into a passenger depot, and later used as a yard office.

(Tony Privett)