Route 66 in the News
A Little Seligman History
2006-05-08 20:27:26
Why Invest in Seligman?
Seligman is still a small town, and anyone who invests in helping it stay that way will get its full support. Restore the Havasu as an architectural treasure and you have a magnet reinforcing Seligman's history. The Havasu was once the center of a thriving Seligman, and we'd like to see it that way again.
Re-Born Twice Already
Seligman's official population has rested at 435 families or 850 people (2004 census) for some time, but it wasn't always so. Twice in history Seligman was a big place, initially with about a dozen train tracks running through, several restaurants, two bars, and later with a department store, six auto dealers, and lots of traffic.
Railroad Days
The first time was in the heyday of the railroad, around 1900, when the Santa Fe Line moved its Arizona midpoint offices from Ash Fork to Seligman. Trains stopped here regularly, not only for mail and for cattle headed for the Chicago and Oklahoma City stockyards but to bring tourists who dined and stayed at the big, handsome, new Havasu Harvey House -- built by the railroad for Fred Harvey -- on the south side of town around 1905.
That period lasted as long as railroads were the nation's principal mode of cross country travel and included World War II, when the Havasu was a regular lunch stop for troop trains headed for the West Coast. My neighbor, Ed, now in his 80's, says that the first time he saw Seligman was when he and hundreds of other conscripts got off here, grabbed an already prepared box lunch at the Havasu or the Copper Cart, stretched their legs and boarded again for San Diego and the Pacific theater of the war.
Long-haul diesels came in the '50's to relieve the need for maintenance stops and crew changes in Seligman, where much of the crew stayed in rooms at the Havasu. Dining cars came, too, and the Harvey Company operated them, reducing need for the Havasu's restaurant facilities.
Ultimately the railroad moved its major operations from Seligman to Needles and the town shrank back down to the few hundred families that had always been there: ranchers and cowboys, some railroad crewmen, and service operations such as the Black Cat Bar, the Copper Cart diner -- survivors. The empty Havasu and the train crew housing along Chino Avenue (now Rte. 66) continue to remind visitors and train buffs of that era. Still inhabited, many of hese trim little cottages have been well maintained, with fruit trees flowering each spring and steer skulls and deer and elk antlers decking their fences.
Seligman and Route 66
But Seligman grew again as cars and Route 66 became the new way to reach the golden West. More and more drivers stopped here to rest, eat, and perhaps to spend the night -- some say 5,000 cars a day! The architecture of those days in the '50's and'60's still predominates downtown, especially in the motels with their big neon signs. It's all now part of the town's official Historic District (highway signs point the way).
But on the day in 1978 that I-40 bypassed downtown Seligman, you could lie down on 66 and take a nap -- not a car to disturb you.
… and Historic Route 66
The town shriveled again, until Angel Delgadillo, the local barber, realized that the nostalgia of Route-66-as-history could bring tourists back.
Little has changed architecturally along Seligman's 66 -- we're pretty much non-gentrified and like it that way -- so that in 2005 the downtown area easily entered the National Trust Register of Historic Districts. We have the motels, the erstwhile car dealerships waiting to be refurbished, the grand but empty Havasu, plus a garage turned Nifty 50's museum, a warehouse, a department store reborn in the five-and-dime tradition, and Angel's barbershop, now a well-promoted tourist mecca. Some lucky visitors can still get a haircut from 79-year-old Angel. And when he's not shaking hands or "selling" Rout 66, you may see him riding his bike from work to home or to the Post Office. His father's old pool hall stands shut and silent on Railroad Avenue.
The now world-famous Snow Cap ice cream store, created by Angel's brother Juan and now run by his sons, is in the next block eastward. There, if you ask for ice cream, you'll probably get a shot of whipped cream on a cup of shaved ice -- kidding aside, eventually you'll get what you thought you'd asked for. The old Seligman Sundries ice cream parlor, now owned by a coffee bean expert, has been bought for revival as -- guess what? -- an ice cream parlor/coffee house. The doctor's house from the Havasu was sold off and moved to the corner of Indian School and Cedar to become the home of the current Postmaster and her family, while the Havasu's reading room was moved to the school to become the Biology Building, its pink brick exterior handsomely restored by Phoenix architects.
A Small Town with Big Potential
In this renascence, conceived and led by the Delgadillos, tourist buses stop daily, in winter and summer, to see what life was like in America's '60's. Bill Riley's Rusty Bolt and Thunderbird Trading stand out, too, with their crowd of mannequins and two beautiful Edsels. There's the handsomely reconstructed brick garage/car museum, Return to the '60's, with its fire-engine-red Edsel.
In fact, in contrast to Winslow, with its bigger population, its actual I-40 interchange with current train stop and its location on Rte. 66, you can't get lost in Seligman. There are no new buildings to drive past in order to find our old ones. History shows up on every street and in every corner, from the Havasu on Railroad Avenue to the mule stall on Schoeny Street to the Cottage Hotel, the town's birthing clinic for much of the 20th century. It's the very model of a small-town-through-history.
Yes, we have two exits from I-40, yes, we're right there on 66, and yes, the trains will stop here again if we give them good reason.
But our strength is our integrity, our single focus on -- the way we live.
As America's small towns get eaten up one by one in population overgrowth and chain stores, Seligman struggles to stay small, even as our land prices triple in value. The actual population is about 1500 and growing due to development of ranches to the east and west of town. But the town's lifeblood is still tourism, and the shopkeepers know that a Pepsi bottling plant, a jail or a Wal-Mart where the Havasu stands now -- or anywhere nearby -- would end it all.
A "Save Small Town America Act"?
Maybe someday the federal government will understand the loss created by the continuing extinction of small town America. Then perhaps it will provide funds for preservation not only of individual buildings but of a unique way of life, the life you see in Seligman. Tourists come because it's still a little village bursting with potential: the old buildings rusticating along 66 and our side streets represent not only the romance of the open road but trains and ranchlands as well -- a veritable and living example of Americana.
For now, though, the struggle rests in the hands of individuals: shopkeepers, cowboys, country churches,… and the enlightened self-interest of outsiders like Allan Affeldt. Allan has been restoring La Posada, Winslow's Harvey House, with love and room by room. It offers continental cuisine courtesy of 100-year-old Fred Harvey menus and recipes, a shop on the lines of Harvey's Indian Trading Rooms, and an exotic collection of portraits of America's First Ladies.
We're looking for investors with that kind of imagination.
~Mary Clurman and Friends of the Havasu
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