The Railroad's Surprising Impact on Food and Civil Rights in California

For her series California Foodways, Lisa Morehouse is reporting a story about food and farming from each of California’s 58 counties.

A lot of kids growing up in California learn about the transcontinental railroad in the fourth grade, and the mostly Chinese laborers who laid the track eastward from Sacramento: leveling, drilling, and tunneling through the Sierra Nevada to meet the tracks that were being built east to west. The so-called “Big Four” railroad tycoons behind this western construction — the Central Pacific Railroad — are also well-known. But some of this history can get overlooked, like how the railroad — and its connection to food — shaped much of California’s story.

Some of the route of Amtrak’s California Zephyr line parallels that of the first transcontinental railroad. One of the most beautiful train routes in the United States, Zephyr’s California path alone is stunning. Leaving Emeryville, near Oakland, it hugs the Bay before passing under the Carquinez Bridge and heading into the Delta, with its islands and snaking waterways. After stopping in Sacramento it climbs through California’s foothills, then into the Sierra Nevada.

Some people ride the California Zephyr just to get from point A to point B. Others, like passenger Jamie Thomas, fly to the Zephyr’s starting point in Chicago just to ride it home to the Bay Area.

“I always took trains with my dad,” Thomas said. “My fondest memories are sitting with him, chatting or getting dinner together. It was a very good place to connect with people.”

Connecting with strangers, even. The dining car — where Thomas was seated next to fellow Bay Area resident Shreya Jalan — practices “community seating.”

“The number of stories we get to hear and exchange, I think it’s really beautiful,” said Jalan, who didn’t know Thomas before the trip.

On shorter routes, a lot of trains have cafe cars, with drinks, snacks and pre-packaged food. But many of the longer Amtrak routes have dining cars like this one, with a full kitchen taking up the whole lower level of this train car. White table cloths and flower vases offset the plastic plates.

Trains would go on to make the Golden State a farming powerhouse. Track-side restaurants and dining cars were precursors to chain restaurants and luxury travel dining. But innovation went hand in hand with exploitation of land and workers, whose resistance against discrimination led to breakthroughs in labor and civil rights. As author and archivist Benjamin Jenkins put it, “The railroad really revolutionizes just about every part of California’s politics, society and economy.”

Laying the tracks

By the time the Central Pacific was completed in 1869, trains with dining cars were already running out of Chicago. It would take California a while to catch up.

But the Big Four had big plans. They bought another railroad line, a tiny one called the Southern Pacific, and expanded it dramatically from the Bay Area, down to Los Angeles over hundreds of miles all the way out to Louisiana.

In the early days of the Southern Pacific, the Big Four had a near-monopoly in California. Riding the train was prohibitively expensive, but when a competing company — the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway — later reached Los Angeles, it caused a rate war. Tickets from Chicago to LA dropped from $125 to $1. Los Angeles went from cowtown to boom town.

Back then, the train offered few amenities, and people packed their own food to avoid terrible roadhouse meals.

“Most of the people would make fried chicken and get on the train. They’d trade some of that fried chicken for pillows and stuff,” said Lawrence Dale, who worked for BNSF Railroad for more than forty-two years.

Standing at an exhibit at the Western American Railroad Museum in Barstow, Dale explained that, the further the trains went, the less practical it was for passengers to bring all of their own food on a trip. And when there’s a business vacuum, someone will try to fill it. Enter Fred Harvey.

The museum takes up a section of what was once Barstow’s Harvey House, a restaurant designed for train passengers, right off the railroad tracks. It’s beautiful — for a building that’s more than 110 years old — with columns, decorative brick arches, and shaded walkways.

In partnership with the Santa Fe railroad, Fred Harvey built Harvey Houses every 100 miles. They served fancy cheeses, oysters, fruit, sirloin, and generous slices of pie. Another big attraction: waitresses known as “Harvey Girls.”

Harvey Girls were young, single, and almost always white.

“All I can tell you about Harvey Girls is they were young women out of the Midwest,” said Dale. “They were brought in here by Fred Harvey, and weren’t allowed to date. They weren’t allowed to do nothing except serve the people.”

Of course, plenty of Harvey Girls did marry, and relocate to farms and ranches across the West. While they were Harvey Girls, they worked long hours, lived in dorms under the watchful eyes of house mothers, and were expected to meet strict standards of decorum and image, down to their uniform.

White gloves, white full cover apron with a black garment underneath. Bow in the back of the hair,” Dale said, pointing to a display. “They were all supposed to be dressed alike.”

For passengers, eating at a Harvey House was an elevated dining experience, but it was more efficient than leisurely. Trains called in passengers’ orders ahead by telegraph.

Say a west-bound train pulled into Needles, Calif. The conductor would come through the cars, taking orders, and contact the next Harvey House down the line in Barstow, letting staff know how many people planned to eat, and what time they’d arrive.

Passengers disembarked, sat in the well-appointed dining room, and had a limited time to eat, before the train left the station.

Harvey Houses were a precursor to fast food and chain restaurants, and they helped change the intent of train travel from something that was just utilitarian, to an experience, according to Ty Smith, director of the California State Railroad Museum.

“Dining was at the heart of the transition from conveyance to experience,” he said.

Sacramento — a city rich in railroad history — is the perfect home for this museum, where kids wearing conductor’s hats and blowing train whistles mingle with adult rail buffs.

“We’re two blocks from mile marker zero, where the Central Pacific Railroad started building from west to east,” Smith said.

Even earlier, during the Gold Rush, trains transported picks and shovels and other goods from the city into the foothills to the miners.

Foodways are embedded throughout the museum, too. Smith points out a display that holds artifacts of a Chinese workers camp: a ginger jar, a tea cup, a rice bowl, a glazed stoneware jar that stored vinegars and sauces.

Even though Chinese workers made up 90% of the labor force for the Central Pacific Railroad, they were in segregated camps, according to Smith.

“The Chinese railroad workers didn’t get the same pay or food allowances that their Irish and other counterparts did,” he said.

Even this small display illustrates the racism baked into the building of the railroads: the chasm between people who owned the railroads and the people who worked on them.

The museum also has a sleeper car on a rocker, to simulate the feeling of being on a train. It’s set up to show how the car would look in both day and evening.

“During the day, the upper berths would be folded up. The lower berths serve as comfy seats,” said Smith.

At night, porters would unfold the upper berths and convert the seats to create beds. Smith pointed to a little button passengers could push to call a porter, if they wanted anything.

Next to the sleeper car is a 1937 Cochiti dining car, which ran on Santa Fe’s Super Chief train between Chicago and Los Angeles.

“That gives us a chance to talk about what it was like to dine on a train during the golden era of rail travel,” Smith said.

In the narrow galley kitchen, it’s hard to imagine all the people needed to work here, to prepare three gourmet meals a day for 50 people.

“The chef, people doing prep, mise-en-place,” Smith enumerated. “You’d have to find a cadence to work within the space. A lot of gleaming stainless steel-like surfaces: knives and graters and colanders and big soup pots.”

All of this was perfectly organized for a tiny space.

Called to the dining room by chimes, passengers would sit among abundant flower arrangements and intricate Art Deco metalwork. They ate at tables with tablecloths and off of china with patterns that reflected the route: poppies in California, and animal images inspired by Native American art in the Southwest.

Docent Allen Blum shared a menu for the Super Chief, including “ripe California colossal olives, grapefruit, orange and raisin fruit, swordfish steak, and poached salmon.”

Menus, like this California-influenced one, often reflected cuisines and ingredients along the route.

Blum said the Super Chief carried politicians and stars from Walt Disney and Jack Benny to Marilyn Monroe, in later years.

“This was definitely considered first class,” he said.

Passengers on dining cars came to expect attentive service — one waiter per two tables. Smith explained that the businessman best known for railroad dining cars was George Pullman. He built and owned luxury train cars to appeal to passengers who wanted to travel in style, and he leased his cars to the railroads.

George Pullman was a master at branding, Smith added “Pullman is creating the romance of train travel. To ride on a Pullman car means something, and this feeds his ability to lease these cars to the railroads.”

But George Pullman built this image and his business on the backs of the Black service workers he hired.

“It was a luxurious experience, but a completely racialized experience,” said Susan Anderson, history curator at the California African American Museum. “From the appointment of the sleeping area to the dining car to the cuisine and the meals, the way that you were waited on, all of that was just premium. And all of it, on the Pullman cars, was provided by Black labor.”

Engines of resistance

White men held positions like engineer and conductor. The servant-type jobs were the ones that were reserved for Black people on the trains: porter, steward, cook, maid and waiter.

“George Pullman and the Pullman Company were explicit about this,” Anderson said. “They wanted white people to be waited on by Black people, because in our history, racism conflated being a slave or being a servant with being Black.”

Porters — who did everything from turning down beds, carrying luggage, and serving food — were usually not addressed by their own names. They were called “George,” after George Pullman.

Susan Anderson said the subjugation of Black workers on trains was a direct reflection of the way the U.S. economy was organized.

“So, that’s U.S. history. But Black history is that they took these positions and they made the most out of them, and they used them to the advantage of their own people and their own families.”

Many African Americans saw railroad jobs as opportunities to broaden their horizons, bring money back home or leave Southern states altogether and move their families elsewhere.

“People who worked for the railroad got a lot of respect in the community,” said Anderson.

Her own family has a connection to railroad history.

“One of my great-grandfathers — my mother’s father’s father — was a chef on the railroad,” she explained.

His name was Edward Wilcox, and his family was originally from Louisiana.

“They came to West Oakland in the late 19th century. They actually established a church in West Oakland. It’s still there: Bethlehem Lutheran Church. And that enclave was partly like a labor reserve for the Southern Pacific Railroad,” said Anderson.

By 1926, the Pullman Company was the largest single employer of African American workers in the country, with over 10,000 porters and 200 maids.

Anderson explained, a lot of intellectuals ended up working as porters or waiters.

“There were college men who had no other employment opportunities in a racist economy,” she said.

These railroad men left a big legacy in American civic and cultural life. In his autobiography, Malcolm X wrote about selling sandwiches on trains. Renowned photographer Gordon Parks waited tables in dining cars. Thurgood Marshall, Willie Brown, Tom Bradley and Dionne Warwick all had fathers who were porters.

Railroad workers networked with each other across the country, sharing copies of Black-owned newspapers and other literature, including The Messenger, founded by influential civil rights activist and labor organizer A. Phillip Randolph.

“And they began the effort to organize so that they could demand better wages, better working conditions for themselves, better hours,” Anderson said.

In an oral history archived at the African American Museum & Library at Oakland, former Oakland-based Pullman porter Cottrell Laurence (C.L.) Dellums explained: “There was no limit on the number of hours. The company unilaterally set up the operation of the runs.”

Dellums, whose nephew Ron Dellums was the late California congressman and former Oakland mayor, started working for the Pullman company in 1924. He said the salary at the time was $60 a month.

“And they provided what we said was just enough rest between trips for the porter to be able to make one more trip,” C.L. Dellums said, in the audio recording. Workloads for the porters varied from 300 to over 400 hours a month.

“Anybody could take the porter’s job. Not only any kind of Pullman official — from the lowest to the highest — could take his job. Anybody traveling as a passenger, even though it might be the first trip they’ve ever been on a train, they could write him up and get him fired.”

Kept out of the American Railway Union, African Americans founded the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters & Maids in 1925, and C.L. Dellums began signing up workers for the union, despite the risks.

“I never heard of a war that there weren’t battles. And never, never heard of a battle without casualties … But I will be heard from. And so I did. And sure enough, of course, they did discharge me,” Dellums said.

He eventually became one of the union’s vice presidents.

It took years, but the Brotherhood became the first Black union to be recognized by the American Federation of Labor. In 1937, they got a contract with Pullman, the first in history between a Black union and a large U.S. Company. They established an eight-hour work day, regulated work schedules, and increased pay.

The Brotherhood influenced much more than service work on railroads. They helped push through the desegregation of the defense industry during World War II. And they were on the ground for many efforts during the Civil Rights Movement — including the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and the March on Washington.

We tend to pay a lot of attention to these big historic moments, but they only were possible after decades of networking and organizing by the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.

The people behind the simple act of railroad dining changed California, and the country.

How railroads changed what and how we eat

Along the California Zephyr’s route through the outskirts of Sacramento, intricate irrigation systems and crops in perfect rows reveal the railroad’s impact on agriculture.

Archivist Benjamin Jenkins has written about the railroad’s impact on what we eat in his book, Octopus’s Garden: How Railroads and Citrus Transformed Southern California.

“The first entire railroad car full of oranges left Los Angeles for the Midwest in 1877,” Jenkins told KQED.

Those oranges traveled by a refrigerator car, packed with ice. “It had to be re-iced 10 times, going across the desert and the Badlands to make sure that the fruit didn’t spoil,” he explained.

It took California’s produce industry about a decade after that to take off. “But once it starts, it really never looks back,” Jenkins said, “So the explosion of new people, new crops as a result of the railroad bringing them in, and then shipping the goods out, is just utterly transformative for California.”

Railroads built “spur lines” off the main lines to access huge parts of the state.

“Wherever the railroad goes, land values start to increase,” Jenkins said. “And so they are able to sell land at a premium.”

Jenkins explained that in many states, the government had given the railroads loans, and gifted them enormous tracts of land. The idea was that after the tracks were built, the railroads could sell off much of that land at a profit to farmers, who’d build packing houses right on the railroad tracks. There were fewer of these kinds of land grants in California, but the railroad companies still got rights of way — sometimes over Native People’s reservations — and became huge landowners.

Communities tried to entice railroads to come their way. Entire “citrus cities” began forming in the late 1800s along the railroads, especially in Southern California.

Railroads shipped out more than just produce.

“Full color advertising starts to appear in the late 19th and early 20th centuries selling a packaged California lifestyle.” The Southern Pacific Railroad launched Sunset Magazine as a part of this campaign to draw people out west.

Wooden packing crates got loaded onto trains, sporting labels with illustrations of almost comically-perfect produce.

“All of these images show a perpetually sunny Golden State, the fruits of paradise being grown underneath these purple snow-capped mountains,” said Jenkins.

The railroad even circulated California postcards, advertising the state as what Jenkins called a “new Eden,” an image that would endure — well beyond the heyday of train travel.

This story was produced as part of California Foodways with support from the Food and Environment Reporting Network, and California Humanities, a nonprofit partner of National Endowment for the Humanities. Big thanks also go to the African American Museum and Library at Oakland, the library and archives at the California State Railroad Museum, and Rachel Reinhard.