by Jim Hinckley
The establishment of Goffs exemplifies the old adage that with real estate, three things are crucial: location, location, location. From Needles on the Colorado River or from the depths of the Mojave Desert valleys to the west, the site for Goffs was the top of the hill. For the Southern Pacific Railroad in 1883, this made it an ideal place for a siding, water, and fuel stop. As mining and ranching developed in the surrounding regions and the railroad expanded to meet these needs, Goffs’ prominence and importance grew.
The discovery of major silver and gold deposits in Searchlight, Nevada, spawned the 1893 creation of a short line, the Nevada Southern Railway, which linked the mines there with the main line at Goffs. The California Eastern Railroad and eventually the Santa Fe Railroad operated this line until its discontinuance in 1923.
The railroad needed water, which meant that, at regular distances across the dry desert, sidings with wells were established. As a result, early automobile roads and highways closely followed the railroad’s path across the harsh desert plains.
This placed Goffs in an enviable position during the teens. Not only was the town the site for an important rail switching yard, it was also a junction for the National Old Trails Highway and the Arrowhead Highway. The latter was the primary road connecting Los Angeles with Salt Lake City in Utah.
At the Schoolhouse Outdoor Museum Trail in Goffs, the setting may be staged, but the props are authentic. Jim Hinckley
Reflecting the town’s prominence as a transportation hub was the mission-style schoolhouse built of lumber and stucco in 1914. In addition to the eight-hundred-square-foot classroom that doubled as an auditorium for community dances and church services, the building featured a library and two covered porches.
The slide into oblivion began in the early 1920s, first with abandonment of the short line to Searchlight and then with consolidation of railroad service in Needles and Barstow. The commissioning of U.S. 66 that followed the path of the National Old Trails Highway across the desert was but a temporary ray of hope for the remote desert town; five years later, realignment to the south along the present path of Interstate 40 left the town high and dry.
Follow Interstate 40 west from Needles to exit 133, the junction with U.S. Highway 95, and turn north toward Las Vegas. Just south of the railroad crossing, turn right to go west on Goffs Road. This is the pre-1931 alignment of Route 66.
A plaque commemorates forgotten Goffs’ role in World War II. Jim Hinckley
By 1937, the population no longer warranted a school, and the town quickly slipped toward becoming a footnote in the long history of the Mojave Desert. Fittingly, the old schoolhouse, once the crown jewel of a progressive community, played a key role in the next chapter of the town’s history.
During World War II, large swaths of the formidable desert became a stage for the largest war games training center in history as General George S. Patton prepared his troops for the invasion of North Africa. The temporary population of Goffs ebbed and flowed as the army garrisoned soldiers in the area, dismantled abandoned buildings to use for fuel in wood-burning stoves, and transformed the schoolhouse into a mess hall to feed thousands of troops.
After the war, the town again slipped into a deep slumber, and the old schoolhouse became a private residence, a purpose it served until 1954. After its abandonment, the schoolhouse became a habitat for pack rats and snakes seeking shelter from the blazing sun. Vandals and the harsh desert climate quickly transformed the once stately edifice into ruins that mirrored the town around it.
On most days, the wind through the greasewood, the creaking of the windmill, and an occasional barking dog are the only sounds heard in Goffs.
The schoolhouse’s resurrection began in 1982 with the vision of Jim and Bertha Wold, employees of the OX Ranch north of Goffs. After purchasing the property, the Wolds stabilized the old schoolhouse, which was literally on the verge of collapse with most of the east wall gone and the roof sagging by several feet.
The next and most amazing chapter in the history of this forlorn, forgotten little town, surrounded by some of the most inhospitable landscape in America, came with the acquisition of the property by Dennis and Jo Ann Casebier. Their passionate stewardship, leadership, and hard labor have, with the assistance of countless volunteers, transformed the old schoolhouse and the ghost town of Goffs into one of the most astounding and, perhaps, most overlooked treasures on Route 66.
An eclectic collection of souvenirs representing more than a century and a half of life in the Mojave Desert surrounds the schoolhouse-turned-museum. The building also serves as headquarters for the Mojave Desert Heritage & Cultural Association. There is no neon or kitsch—just a small grove of trees, a windmill, and other trappings of a desert oasis to catch the passing motorist’s eye.
Those who stop are pleasantly surprised. The old schoolhouse appears as it did in 1914. Inside is a dazzling array of simple exhibits that range from fine art, rare photographs, and arrows to a functioning wood-burning caboose stove that provides heat in the winter and artifacts from World War II.
Throughout the well-maintained grounds, and linked by pleasant little trails, are artifacts ranging from a weatherworn 1921 Buick to an Atlantic & Pacific boxcar more than a century old. The bronze eagle on the flagpole is from General George S. Patton’s Indio headquarters. The site contains an operational stamp mill painstakingly moved from an old mine and reassembled on site as well as a collection of bottles with glass turned purple from the desert sun, vintage highway signs, and gas pumps. You’ll find telephone poles from the first transcontinental telephone line and an aircraft beacon dating to the 1920s, ore cars and antique railroad crossing gates, and pumps, crushers, and other mining equipment that predate Route 66 by decades.
To say the very least, the schoolhouse and outdoor museum add flesh to the dry, dusty bones of the forgotten outpost of Goffs.
The empty windows of the old general store framing a desert sky present a haunting image in Goffs.
GHOSTS OF THE DESERT CAULDRON
ESSEX MAY HAVE BEGUN LIFE around 1883 as a water stop for the railroad, but it was as an oasis for the motorist that it blossomed from a siding into a very busy wide spot in the road. Adding to its prominence in this capacity were efforts to promote automobile travel and the development of good roads in the Mojave Desert by the Automobile Club of Southern California. The organization drilled a roadside well here to create an oasis with signs that proclaimed “Free Water” in the late teens.
By 1930, the dusty little town was a beehive of activity with a “business district” that met the needs of travelers, a new breed of teamsters known as truckers, the desperate Okies, and the hardy few who eked a living out of the unforgiving desert. The commerce included a market, a garage, a post office, and a service station.
The bypass of Goffs in 1931 greatly increased Essex’s importance to Route 66 travelers crossing the desert. Additionally, in 1937, the Goffs school closed, the Goffs School District was absorbed into the Needles Unified School District, and a new schoolhouse was built in Essex.
During World War II, traffic slowed to a crawl, the result of wartime rationing of gasoline. Still, the establishment of Camp Essex Army Airfield three miles to the northeast (a small POW camp for the internment of Italian military personnel) and the vast war games that engulfed the Mojave Desert ensured there was no lack of business for tiny Essex.
Rittenhouse notes that Essex had a population of fifty-five in 1946 and businesses that included a gas station, a lunchroom, a small grocery, and a post office.
An old postcard captures Essex as a former Route 66 oasis. Joe Sonderman collection
Good food at the café in Essex is as much a distant memory as a shiny new ’57 Chevy filing up with high octane at the pump out front.
The Mountain Springs Road exit on Interstate 40, exit 115, seventeen miles west of Needles, is the junction with the post-1931 alignment of Route 66; take this exit south to reach Essex, Danby, Cadiz, Summit, Chambless, Amboy, B
agdad, and Ludlow. A secondary option is to continue west on Interstate 40 through Fenner and take exit 107, Goffs Road, then turn south.
Today, U.S. 66 is as empty as the desert that embraces it, but Chambless still appears as a mirage in the distance. Jim Hinckley
Essex’s brief moment of fame came in 1977 after the bypass of U.S. 66 by Interstate 40. A feature in the Los Angeles Times proclaimed that Essex was so remote it was the last community in the continental forty-eight states without television service—after which all thirty-five residents were invited to the Johnny Carson Show, and a manufacturer in Pennsylvania donated the necessary translator equipment to move the town into the modern era.
The well remains, even though water is no longer available. The café and garage are closed. Only the post office remains in operation.
Danby, the next town to the west, began life as a water stop for the railroad in the Mojave Desert. These stops, initially named from west to east in alphabetical order, proved important for early motorists.
At some point, Danby morphed into a small oasis on the National Old Trails Highway, Route 66 after 1926. The 1914 edition of the Los Angles/Phoenix route map of the Desert Classic race course indicates that services offered here included repairs, oil, and gas—the same limited services Rittenhouse noted thirty-two years later in his guidebook. Today, a high fence protects the sparse remnants from vandals. The elements are another matter, however, and soon there will be little to mark the site of Danby but ruins.
Roy’s Motel and Café is one of the most well-known sites along Route 66.
Cadiz has shared origins with Danby. However, its period as a service center for motorists was a short one, for when Route 66 supplanted the National Old Trails Highway, a bypass of three miles left this wide spot in a desert road high and dry.
Nearby on Route 66 are the remains of Summit, occasionally listed as Cadiz Summit. This often results in confusion. Summit was an oasis spawned by Route 66 and the needs of those who drove it. In 1946, Rittenhouse notes that it consisted of “A handful of tourist cabins, a café, and gas station.” Today, graffiti covers the ruins of these structures at the top of the pass through the Marble Mountains, and all manner of garbage litters the grounds.
The reason James Albert Chambless chose to relocate from the forested hills of Arkansas to the desolate wilderness of the Mojave Desert is a mystery. What we do know is that the Automobile Club of Southern California noted his proprietor-ship of a small store at the junction of Cadiz Road and the National Old Trails Highway in 1922 and that, with the 1931 realignment of the highway and its designation as U.S. 66, he relocated his business and reestablished it as Chambless Camp.
Between this point in time and the mid-1930s, Chambless Camp became Chambless, and James Chambless faded into obscurity. During this period, his namesake community grew into a very busy desert oasis that included a grove of trees and a post office, a gas station, motel cabins, a café, and a store.
For Rittenhouse in 1946, Chambless mirrored Danby in that it consisted of a “wide porched gas station, with a café and several tourist cabins.” He also noted, “Except for Ludlow, California, there are no ‘towns’ which merit the definition between Needles and Daggett, California, a stretch of about 150 miles.”
The wide porch that once offered travelers the slightest bit of respite from the blistering sun is now gone, victim of a fierce desert storm, but the store built of adobe bricks and the small stone cabins remain. Sequestered behind a towering chainlink fence topped by razor wire, they stand in silent testimony to better times on the old double six and await their resurrection.
Several years ago, Gus Lizalde purchased and fenced the property. His dream to breathe new life into Chambless with its refurbishment as a Route 66 time capsule—and plans for a massive solar-powered generating facility immediately to the west—may once again make the town more than a dusty footnote to the history of the Mojave Desert and Route 66, but at this time the store remains roofless.
The towering Roy’s Motel and Café sign erected in 1959 has contributed greatly toward making Amboy one of the most famous ghost towns on Route 66. The sign and its namesake café and gas station have figured prominently in commercials promoting everything from Dodge trucks to Qwest. The sign has also appeared as a backdrop in numerous films, including Hitcher, a 1986 thriller starring Rutger Hauer.
By the mid-1980s, the settlement that survived more than a century in one of the most inhospitable places in America had dwindled to less than a shadow of its former self. The bypass of Route 66 by Interstate 40 in the early 1970s, and the subsequent bulldozing of most of the town by the major land owner, Buster Burris, to avoid tax liabilities, hastened its abandonment.
There are indications that salt mining may have taken place near the site of Amboy, as it does today, shortly before the opening salvo of the Civil War. However, it was the establishment of a railroad siding and water stop by the Atlantic & Pacific Railroad in 1883 that literally put Amboy on the map.
Before the rise of Roy’s Cafe, with its towering sign, Amboy was a dusty oasis in a sea of desert. Joe Sonderman collection
As such, the little encampment languished until the establishment of the National Old Trails Highway during the teens and the designation of its replacement, U.S. 66. The Hotel, Garage, Service Station, and AAA Club Directory of 1927 indicates the population was one hundred and the primary service available was the J. M. Bender Garage.
Notes by Jack Rittenhouse in 1946 clearly indicate the importance of Route 66 in these remote desert communities. “Pop. 264—this desert community consists of two cafés, a garage, and café.”
The postwar travel boom and the endless stream of traffic on Route 66 kept the businesses in Amboy busy twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. They also ensured continued expansion of the miniscule town, and by 1960, the business district included a motel, a second service station that offered gasoline for forty-nine cents per gallon when the national average was somewhere around twenty cents per gallon, and a very busy towing company.
The unofficial mayor of Amboy, Buster Burris, shepherded the small desert community from the infancy of its glory days to its demise. He arrived on the scene in 1938 to assist his father-in-law, Roy Howard, in the management of a motel business. This endeavor soon expanded to include a garage and café, Roy’s.
By the early 1950s, Amboy was a boom-town. Three shifts of mechanics worked in the Burris garage, and there was seldom a vacancy at the motel or cabins.
With the completion of Interstate 40 in 1972, Route 66 reverted from a river of gold to an empty, forlorn stretch of dusty asphalt across a desert wilderness. Business in Amboy evaporated quicker than snow in July on the sunbaked pavement. Buster Burris, who eventually owned most of the town, kept the station going for a few more years, but the writing was on the wall.
By the late 1990s, the area population had dwindled to less than fifty. This, however, was not the final chapter.
The resurgent interest in Route 66 led chicken tycoon Albert Okura, founder of Juan Pollo and owner of the original McDonald’s in San Bernardino, California, to purchase the entire town in 2005—including the airstrip, Roy’s, the church, the schoolhouse, and the remaining houses—from Burris’s widow, Bessie. His vision is to transform what remains into a showpiece reflecting the essence of Route 66 circa 1960.
A few miles west of Amboy, Bagdad was even tinier than its neighbor. The 1939 WPA Guide to California claimed the population was twenty, and the 1940 census placed it at twenty-five residents. Adding to the mental picture of just how desolate the area was, Rittenhouse says, “Skeletons of abandoned cars are frequent along the roadside.” He also records that “Except for a few railroad shacks, this community consists solely of a service station, café, garage, and a few tourist cabins, all operated by one management. At one time, Bagdad was a roaring mining center.”
The Amboy School has long been closed. Jim Hinckley
The tangible links to a long and co
lorful history in Ludlow are fast succumbing to desert winds, time, and vandals.
There are vague indications that the origins of Bagdad date to as early as 1875 with the establishment of a small camp at the site and mines in the surrounding mountains. However, it is the construction of a siding in 1883 by the Atlantic & Pacific Railroad that serves as Bagdad’s agreed-upon date of origin.
The growth of Bagdad—what there was of it, anyway—centered on the railroad, which supplied the needs of remote mines in the area, specifically the Orange Blossom and the War Eagle, as well as shipping ores from a nearby mill. By 1889, the town was large enough to warrant a post office. Two decades later, the remote outpost of civilization consisted of a small depot, a commissary, saloons, a hotel, and even a Harvey House restaurant that catered mostly to railroad employees.
Following the closure of the area’s largest mines, a devastating fire erased most of the business district in 1918. The second blow, consolidation of railroad service and repair in Needles and Barstow, followed almost immediately. Only the traffic on the National Old Trails Highway, and later Route 66, prevented complete abandonment.
Today, Bagdad is a historical footnote. Only sand-obscured concrete foundations, a sign designating a railroad siding, a forlorn but surprisingly well-maintained cemetery, and an unofficial railroad record indicating 767 consecutive days between 1912 and 1914 without rain remain to mark its place in history. This is truly a Route 66 ghost town.
