Harvey Girls

by Juliette Fay

Genres: Friendship; Siblings

Synopsis

Juliette Fay—known for her “well-drawn characters and vibrant historical backdrops” (Library Journal)—transports us to 1920s America with this big-hearted tale of two very different women who must learn to trust each other as one tries save her family and the other to save herself. Perfect for fans of Kristin Hannah and Kristina McMorris.

1926: Charlotte Crowninshield was born into one of the finest Boston society families. Now she’s on the run from a brutal husband, desperate to disappear into the wilds of the Southwest. Billie MacTavish is the oldest of nine children born to Scottish immigrants in Nebraska. She quit school in the sixth grade to help with her mother’s washing and mending business, but even that isn’t enough to keep the family afloat.

Desperate, both women join the ranks of the Harvey Girls, waitresses who serve in America’s first hospitality chain on the Santa Fe railroad. Hired on the same day, they share three things: a room, a heartfelt dislike of each other…and each has a secret that will certainly get them fired.

Through twelve-hour days of training in Topeka, Kansas, they learn the fine art of service, perfecting their skills despite bouts of homesickness, fear of being discovered, and a run-in with the KKK. When they’re sent to work at the luxurious El Tovar hotel at the Grand Canyon, the challenges only grow, as Billie struggles to hide her young age from would-be suitors, and Charlotte discovers the little-known dark side of the national park’s history.

“Juliette Fay’s gift for creating complex, exquisitely human characters” (Marisa de los Santos, New York Times bestselling author) is on full display in this deeply moving and joyous celebration of female empowerment, loyalty, and friendship.

Release date: August 12, 2025

Publisher: Gallery Books

Print pages: 384

Sample

Prologue

Prologue
In 1853, a seventeen-year-old named Fred Harvey emigrated from London to New York City with only a few dollars in his pocket. He got a job as a pot walloper (dishwasher) at a popular restaurant, where he rose up the ranks to line cook and nurtured a lifelong passion for fine dining.

By the age of thirty he was working as a traveling railroad agent, but he never gave up the dream of owning his own restaurant. At the time, steam engines stopped every hundred miles or so to refuel with coal and water. Rustic food stands cropped up at these stations to serve hungry passengers. At best, the offerings were simple; at worst, they resulted in death by food poisoning.

Fred was certain that if he could provide high-quality food at these stops, both he and the railroad would prosper. He approached the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway, which had stops from Kansas throughout the Southwest, and in 1876, Fred opened his first restaurant at the Topeka, Kansas, depot. The reception was so enthusiastic that many more Harvey Houses, as they were called, soon followed. In fact, the slogan of the ATSF became “Meals by Fred Harvey.” Thus began the first hospitality empire in America.

Fred’s success was achieved through razor-sharp business acumen and an unwavering demand for quality. His restaurants had white tablecloths, fine silver, excellent food, and arguably the best coffee in the nation. He was remarkably unafraid to try new business methods. This was never more evident than when he hired an all-female waitstaff.

At the time, women’s options for respectable employment were limited to jobs such as being a nurse, secretary, or teacher. Domestic or factory work was for the lower classes. Restaurant service was considered only a few rungs up the ladder from prostitution. Fred Harvey’s problem, however, was that his male waiters tended to get drunk and into fights.

He solved this problem—for himself and for approximately one hundred thousand women who would become not waitresses but “Harvey Girls”—by instituting puritanical rules. They wore uniforms that were about as alluring as a nun’s habit, lived in dorms with strict curfews, and were prohibited from dating other Harvey employees. They had to comport themselves with utmost propriety at all times or risk immediate termination.

The irony is that in return for complying with all these rules, they received unprecedented freedom. Harvey Girls were better paid than women in almost any other profession and could spend that money during generous vacation time, during which they were allowed to ride the trains and stay at other Harvey Houses at no cost. Former Harvey Girls often reported that it was a remarkable education, not only in how to do things well and with care, but also in how to take control of their own destinies.

Many also found love. Until well into the 1900s, the Southwest was populated predominantly by men—ranchers, farmers, prospectors, railroad workers. As the saying went, there were “no ladies west of Dodge City, and no women west of Albuquerque.” Local men were all too happy with the influx of females into their communities.

It’s estimated that about half of all Harvey Girls chose to remain in the Southwest after their service ended, many marrying and raising families there. Thousands of baby boys from these matches were named Fred or Harvey.

Such an honor was understandable. The man not only fed the Southwest and taught it manners… he was also indirectly responsible for populating it.

Chapter One

One

Kansas City, Missouri

Charlotte felt the woman’s scrutiny like heat from a flame too close to her skin. She forced herself not to flinch away from it; flinching, she’d learned, only invited more trouble.

“And you’ve never waitressed before?” Miss Steele said lightly, as if to counterpoise the obvious fact that she was making far more important assessments. Charlotte could practically see the cogs turning behind the woman’s benevolent facade.

“No, I… well, I worked at a milliner’s shop, and I served people. But not food.”

A hat shop. Even now it was hard to believe. That was not the life he’d described, the life he’d promised. But becoming a shopgirl was the least of it. Promises had fallen like autumn leaves on the Boston Common, hadn’t they?

“That’s just fine. We prefer girls without prior experience. They tend to have fewer bad habits to correct.”

“Bad habits?” Charlotte was certain that if she’d had any—which she doubted—they’d been trained out of her at the highly esteemed Winsor School for Girls. “A Sound Mind in a Sound Body” was their motto, and she’d taken it very much to heart. Until lately.

“Like serving a beverage without a tray, or wearing an apron with a spot on it,” Miss Steele explained. “Or smiling a little too long at a customer.”

“Flirting.”

“Exactly.”

Miss Steele was the head of personnel for Fred Harvey, and she wore the confidence of her position plainly but without condescension. Charlotte had never heard of a woman achieving so high an appointment in such a large company and assumed that Miss Steele was a member of the extended Harvey family. Either that or she knew things they preferred to remain private.

“Keep your friends close and your enemies closer,” her father often said when he’d returned from a particularly trying day at his shipping company. She’d been living the “enemies closer” part of that adage for far too long now.

“I don’t flirt.” This seemed important to say. In the last two years, Charlotte had become a keen observer of what to say—and, more crucially, what not to say—at any given moment.

“I’m glad to hear that.” Miss Steele studied her face, particularly her right eye. She glanced down at Charlotte’s left hand, the one that had, until an hour ago, worn a gold band. “You’re not married?”

“No.”

Sometimes you had to fib. That was important, too. Charlotte fought the urge to touch the tender skin under her eye. She had waited a week for the swelling to go down and the car-tire black to fade to jaundice yellow.

“And there’s nothing keeping you from traveling far from home?”

“Oh, no. Not at all.” Charlotte almost laughed. Quite the opposite.

Miss Steele pursed her lips and looked out the window. The office was on the second floor of Union Station in Kansas City, Missouri, and a cold March rain speckled the panes, obscuring the train yard and the city beyond. Charlotte curled her toes in her best black patent leather pumps with the champagne-colored bows. Well, the bows were gone now; one had come off, and she couldn’t go around with one bow, so she’d torn the other from its spot and tucked it away. For what purpose she couldn’t say. A reminder of better times, perhaps, or the abysmal depth of her own stubborn foolishness.

The woman leveled a meaningful gaze. “Miss Turner, I feel I must ask about your eye. You seem to have received a blow of some kind.”

I was reaching for a book on a high shelf at the library, and it just leapt out at me! She’d say it with a self-deprecating chuckle.

But sometimes you had to tell the truth, which Miss Steele seemed to intuit anyway.

“Yes,” Charlotte said. “And if you give me a job, the bruise will fade. If you don’t, it will simply be renewed.”

Billie had heard that the famous Fred Harvey food was the best in the West, but the biscuit tasted like a mouthful of flour straight from the sack.

“Now, eat that,” said her mother. The remnants of Lorna MacTavish’s Scottish brogue came out when she was tired or worried. Today she was both. “We can’t have you fainting away up there. You’re looking awfully peely-wally.”

“You have it.” Billie pushed the plate down the lunch counter in Union Station. “Or save it for the ride back.”

“We’ll be splitting it, if you don’t pull yourself together.”

Billie blinked the tears back from her pale lashes. “I don’t want to go,” she whispered.

“Och, dinna fash, now,” murmured Lorna to her eldest child. “There’s a whole big world out there! I never got to see it, but now you will.”

“Who’ll help with the kids and the washing? Who’ll get dinner on when the mending’s due for the Suttons?” Billie fingered tears out of the hollows under her eyes. “Not Malcolm.”

“Your father works hard, and don’t call him by his given name, cheeky,” Lorna scoffed. “You want to go and haul bricks for ten hours and then fetch dinner for nine squalling bairns?”

“Maw, I don’t want to leave them. I… I don’t want to leave you.”

She had seen her mother cry only once, after her toddling sister Sorcha had fallen into the great wash barrel and drowned. Lorna smiled hard, but the tears trickled down her face nonetheless. She put her knobby hand on Billie’s, the fingers softer than rough work should’ve allowed. “You’ll have your chance to see new places and have an adventure! You’ll earn good money, and then you’ll come back to me, and we’ll all be together.”

“Don’t make me go…”

A sob broke out of the woman’s chest. “If I had any choice in the matter, lass, you’d never leave my side.”

Billie waited in one of the chairs outside the personnel office as her mother had instructed. The letter inviting her for an interview was clutched in her hand along with a clipping of the advertisement they’d answered.

Wanted, young women, 18–30 years of age, of good moral character, attractive and intelligent, as waitresses in Harvey Eating Houses on the Santa Fe Railway in the West. Wages $25 per month with room and board. Liberal tips customary. Experience not necessary. Write Fred Harvey, Union Station, Kansas City, Missouri.

She didn’t know why her mother had insisted she have the ad but could only guess that Lorna MacTavish had seen more than her fair share of offers reneged, and those words indicated a contract of sorts. Billie would supply the good moral character, intelligence, and fair looks Fred Harvey required; now he had to hold up his end.

That business about being eighteen… well… her maw always said she was born fully grown. Wise beyond her years and—at five feet, ten inches—taller than most of the men she knew: her father and his friends from the brick factory, her younger brothers, and even the other boys at school. Of course, it had been several years since she’d stopped attending school so she could help her mother with her washing and mending business. Maybe those schoolboys had grown.

Billie’s mother had bobbed her long blond hair to make her look more grown-up. “It’s the fashion now,” Lorna had said. “All the flippers wear it.”

“Flappers,” Billie had corrected her. She still missed her braids.

But sitting on that hard wooden chair in the seemingly endless hallway outside Fred Harvey’s office, there was nothing she missed more than her mother.

“This one, all we did is feed her,” Lorna would say with a hint of pride when someone complimented her on her daughter’s hard work, pleasant demeanor, kindness to the younger children, or even that silky straight blond hair. As if Lorna’s love and guidance all those years had been unnecessary, and Billie would’ve turned out well all the same. But Billie knew plenty of girls whose mothers were too angry or worn out from hard luck to give any such kind attention to their older children, focused as they were on just keeping the younger ones alive. Most of those girls had gone hard and mean, and Billie had to assume she would have, too.

It was on her mother’s insistence that Billie read the paper every day. “It’s your education!” Lorna would say. “The world is a damn sight bigger than this speck of sod.”

Billie herself had seen the advertisement for Harvey Girls, as they were called, and remarked on it as they took a few minutes to eat their lunch of hard bread and a bit of cheese one day. Lorna had seized upon the idea immediately. “It’s a fortune they’re offering, and you’ll see the country! I wish they took tired old ladies, but I’m three years past the deadline.” The fact that at fifteen Billie was three years below the deadline was scoffed away.

The money was, in fact, a fortune. Twenty-five dollars a month! Her father made forty dollars, and her mother about fifteen from taking in other people’s sweaty, dirty, sometimes even bloody clothes. With room and board included, Billie could send virtually all of that vast sum home. It would mean her younger siblings could continue with school, her father could fix his broken-down truck, and her mother… her mother might be able to get just a little bit of a rest from time to time.

Billie didn’t want the job.

But she knew she had to get it.

A woman with blunt-cut brown hair and a matronly but fashionable blue serge dress opened the door. “Wilamena MacTavish?” she said. Her eyes widened as Billie rose from the seat to her full height. Billie quickly slouched down just a bit, so as not to look so ungainly.

She followed the woman into the office, and to Billie’s surprise, she sat down behind a large mahogany desk. “I’m Miss Steele,” she began.

“Oh. I… I thought…,” stammered Billie.

“Yes?”

“Aren’t I supposed to talk to Fred Harvey?”

The woman smiled, and Billie could tell she was biting the inside of her lip to keep from laughing. Billie slunk a little lower in her chair.

“Oh dear, I’m sorry,” said Miss Steele. “It’s been a long day, and I suppose I’ve got a little bit of the giggles. Does that ever happen to you when you’re tired? You get the giggles?”

“Oh yes,” Billie said solemnly. “Certainly.”

“Let me explain. Fred Harvey started the company many years ago, back in 1876. He passed away in 1901, and his sons took over the business.”

“But that was twenty-five years ago!”

“Yes.”

“So why do all the railroad advertisements say ‘Meals by Fred Harvey’ if he’s not still doing the cooking?”

Miss Steele was biting her lip again. She coughed into her hand several times. “Mr. Harvey never actually prepared the meals himself, dear. It was his company, and he hired people as chefs, butchers, pastry men…”

“Are you saying he never cooked a meal even once?”

Miss Steele smiled indulgently. Billie knew that sort of grin—hadn’t she smiled like that a thousand times when her younger sisters and brothers misunderstood something? She felt her cheeks flush for shame.

“He was no stranger to the kitchens in his many restaurants,” said Miss Steele. “In fact there are those who might say he took an excessive interest in how every last thing was prepared and presented, right down to the butter pats.” She clasped her hands and set them on the vast expanse of dark wood. “Now, shall we commence the interview?”

Miss Steele wanted to know about her life, where she’d grown up, how long she’d gone to school. Lorna had warned Billie that she’d have to lie and say she was older, with more schooling than she actually had. Fifteen with a sixth-grade education would not get her that job. They had practiced, and Billie felt she had sufficiently presented herself as qualified.

But Miss Steele was not laughing anymore, nor even smiling. “You seem a little young to me. Perhaps you might apply again in a year or so.”

Billie’s heart soared. She didn’t have to go! She could apply again in a year, and a year was a long, long time.

But then she thought of her mother waiting downstairs with only one return train ticket in her hand. They barely had enough money for that. How could Billie ever tell her they needed another?

“Miss Steele…” Billie unclenched her hands from her lap and laid them gently on the desk between them, willing them not to tremble.

“Yes, Miss MacTavish?”

“Can I just say… thank you. Thank you very kindly for giving me the chance to come here and talk with you. And that I’d be proud… so very proud… to be a Harvey Girl. It would be a… a crowning achievement.” (She’d read that phrase in the newspaper once and puzzled over it. When did anyone get a crown for achieving anything? You were lucky to get a handshake.)

Miss Steele’s scrutiny, dark eyes taking in the newly cut hair and cheeks that had only lately lost their roundness, seemed to last an hour, though it was likely only a moment.

“You’re well-spoken. You say you’re a high school graduate?”

“Oh, yes.” A thought occurred to Billie, and she added quickly, “I would’ve brought my diploma, excepting it was setting on the piano for all to see when a strong breeze blew it straight out the window.” She shook her head mournfully. “We never could find it. Must have ended up in an owl’s nest.”

She’d never told so many lies in all her life! They no more had a piano than they had Charles Lindbergh sitting in his monoplane behind the clothesline.

Miss Steele’s face went quizzical for a moment, and Billie was certain she’d lost the job.

“All right,” said Miss Steele. “We’ll give you a try. You’re to report here tomorrow morning at seven thirty sharp. Does that suit you?”

“Oh, yes! Thank you, Miss Steele! I’ll be ready and waiting.”

She certainly hadn’t lied about waiting. She told her mother the news just in time for Lorna to catch the last train back to Table Rock, Nebraska. They barely had a moment to say their good-byes.

“Now work hard, and they’ll all love you,” Lorna murmured into Billie’s tearstained cheek as she clutched her daughter one last time. “And stay as good as you are.”

“Maw…,” Billie whispered. “Think of me.”

“I’ll be doing nothing else till I see you again, darling girl.” Before the catch in her throat turned to sobs, Lorna kissed her firstborn child and closest friend, pressed the half-eaten biscuit into her hand, and strode quickly toward the tracks.

Before she’d gone, she had scouted out the perfect well-lit spot for her daughter to await the dawn: between the ticket windows and the all-night Fred Harvey lunch counter. Billie sank down onto the wooden bench, pulled her wool cap low over her brow, and had herself a long, silent cry.

Charlotte chose the darkest, most untraveled corner of the cavernous train station and sat with her monogrammed suitcase tucked under the bench behind her crossed ankles. The suitcase was fairly well battered—Simeon had seen to that. He had a tendency to throw it when he was railing against oligarchy in its many serpentine forms, and the robber barons with their heels on the working man’s neck, etc., etc. She could recite it all like a many-versed poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, perhaps, which Simeon had taught to her freshman English class at Wellesley College.

A little thing like a gold-embossed monogram could set him off. She’d taken to hiding the suitcase in various places, which had gotten harder once they’d moved from their two-room flat when they first arrived in St. Louis, to the one-room, fifth-floor walk-up. It was there that she’d developed a fear of heights from regularly being pushed up against the window and threatened with a quick descent to the street far below.

When his presumed speedy advancement from cub reporter to city desk at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch failed to materialize, they’d taken an even smaller room at a boardinghouse, at which point it had been all but impossible to hide the suitcase, his second-favorite target.

Simeon Lister had impressed all the Wellesley College girls with the breadth and depth of his knowledge of English literature, his love of poetry, his ability to capture minds—and more than a few hearts—with his passion for words. He was not wellborn or overly handsome, but oh, how he could talk.

He could also listen. Unlike boys their own age, he asked about their lives, interests, and hopes for the future. His gentle questioning and appearance of deep interest could unearth long-buried secrets. This uncanny talent for exposing closet-dwelling skeletons combined with his growing disdain for teaching “the overfed, husband-hunting, vapid spawn of the bourgeoisie” led him to quit academia and pursue a career in journalism, where he planned to expose the depraved machinations of the rich.

He had been raised in a fairly comfortable middle-class family in Worcester—a family he’d rejected as “dull and incurious” as he strove for higher education. As a successful college instructor, Simeon likely would have risen through the academic ranks, but his own hubris had derailed him. He’d thought getting work as a newspaper reporter for an educated man like him would be easy. He’d been wrong.

The move to Missouri was Charlotte’s fault, of course. They’d had to settle far enough from her family to make a statement about the permanence of her commitment to him, he’d said. She learned only later, when cheap bootleg gin had made him loose-lipped, that he’d applied to every major news outlet in the country—including his beloved Boston Globe—but only the St. Louis Post-Dispatch had responded.

Could he find her now, with his hound’s nose for sniffing out apparently random details that soon braided themselves into a fact trail? She had used a false surname, that of a brave college classmate who’d been badly burned in a fire and lived with many more scars than Charlotte now bore. She kept her first name because she was afraid of rousing suspicion if she forgot to answer to a new one. Besides, as Simeon loved to sneer, “There are countless Charlottes.”

She had told no one of her plan to become a waitress, of all things. Not even her brother, Oliver, the sole family member who still occasionally wrote to her after she’d run off like that, sullying the exalted Crowninshield name with elopement.

She had taken nothing but her latest wages from the milliner’s shop—most of which had gone toward the train ticket from St. Louis to Kansas City—and the suitcase with her clothing and what few mementos hadn’t been tossed out various windows by Simeon over the last two years. She had been scrupulous in her secrecy, even waiting to arrive in this unknown city to pawn her wedding ring. He would never find her in the vast and barren frontier lands. With his persistent disgust at her privileged upbringing, he wouldn’t think to look west, and wouldn’t expect her to last more than a week if he did.

She was safe—or would be soon enough. Safer than she’d been in years, despite being a woman alone in a public train station, at an hour favored by criminals and miscreants.

A battered suitcase was nothing to invite the interest of thieves, she reminded herself as the night passed. But no matter how many times it had sailed across a room, that monogram had a way of shining like a beacon.