Along old Route 66 in Holbrook, Arizona, there is a place where the highway’s past never completely disappeared.
Fifteen white, cone-shaped rooms stand around a gravel courtyard, each decorated with red zigzags and topped with poles that reach into the desert sky. Old automobiles sit among them as if their owners checked in sometime during the Eisenhower administration and never left.
This is the Wigwam Motel, officially Wigwam Village No. 6, one of the most recognizable survivors of the golden age of the American roadside.
I first posted a photograph of the motel on Exit78 in 2016, with only a few lines explaining that Frank Redford came up with the idea and that seven Wigwam Villages once existed.
There is considerably more to the story.
Building Something Motorists Would Remember
Long before chain motels made one night’s lodging look much like another, roadside businesses had to make themselves noticed.
A motorist traveling an American highway in the 1930s, 1940s or 1950s might encounter restaurants shaped like giant objects, filling stations designed to resemble cottages, enormous signs, neon animals, oversized statues and tourist courts built around almost any theme an owner could imagine.
The building itself could be the advertisement.
Kentucky businessman Frank A. Redford understood that idea particularly well.
In the 1930s, Redford developed a roadside complex built around buildings shaped like Native American teepees. He patented the ornamental design in 1936 and eventually developed what became known as the Wigwam Villages.
The terminology was inaccurate even then. A traditional wigwam and a Plains Indian teepee are very different structures. The buildings Redford designed clearly resemble teepees. Redford simply preferred the word wigwam, and the name stuck.
It was roadside marketing, and it worked.
Seven Wigwam Villages were eventually built around the country.
Chester Lewis Finds an Idea
One traveler who noticed Redford’s creation was Chester E. Lewis of Holbrook, Arizona.
Lewis encountered a Wigwam Village while traveling through Kentucky in 1938. He was so impressed that, years later, he arranged with Redford to use the plans and the Wigwam Village name.
Their agreement was unusual.
Instead of simply paying Redford a conventional licensing fee, Lewis installed coin-operated radios in the motel rooms. According to the National Park Service, Lewis sent the money collected from guests who paid to listen to the radios to Redford as his royalty.
On June 1, 1950, Lewis opened Wigwam Village No. 6 beside U.S. Route 66 in Holbrook.
He could hardly have chosen a better moment.
Postwar America was becoming a nation on wheels. Families were buying automobiles, vacation travel was increasing, and Route 66 carried an extraordinary stream of people westward across the country.
A motel that looked unlike any other for hundreds of miles had a considerable advantage.
Children certainly remembered it.
Fifteen Teepees in the Arizona Desert
Lewis built fifteen sleeping units around an open courtyard.
Each is about 21 feet across at the base and 28 feet high, with a wooden framework covered in exterior stucco. Red geometric decoration circles the white exterior, and diamond-shaped windows break up the sides. Pipes projecting from the peak imitate a teepee’s lodge poles.
Lewis called the red zigzag band around the buildings the “lightning of the wigwam.”
Inside, the illusion changes.
Guests do not actually sleep beneath an open cone. The rooms have conventional ceilings, bathrooms, and furnishings. Much of the motel’s original handmade hickory furniture has survived.
The property was designed as more than fifteen unusual rooms. The building arrangement created the impression of a small village, while the office and adjacent structures completed the roadside composition.
The architecture was designed to be seen from an automobile.
And remembered from one.
The National Register nomination later described the property as an example of “novelty/roadside vernacular” architecture—a formal term for something generations of Route 66 travelers already understood instinctively.
You saw the Wigwam Village and wanted to stop.
Route 66 Was the Business
The success of places like Wigwam Village depended on something larger than their architecture.
They depended on the road.
Route 66 ran directly past the property on what is now West Hopi Drive. Travelers came through Holbrook because, for thousands of motorists, there was no reason to go around it.
They needed gasoline.
They needed food.
They needed a bed.
Businesses surrounded them, competing for their attention.
The Wigwam Village offered all the advantages of a roadside motel with something extra: a story travelers could tell when they got home.
“We slept in a wigwam.”
That was the attraction.
Then the American highway system changed.
When the Interstate Went Around Town
The Interstate Highway System was faster, safer and more efficient.
It could also be brutal to towns and businesses that had grown up beside the old highways.
When Interstate 40 bypassed downtown Holbrook, traffic that had once rolled directly past the Wigwam Village increasingly rolled past Holbrook instead.
The motel eventually closed.
National Register records say the lodging operation was shut down from 1974 to 1988, although the property continued to sell gasoline for part of that period. The new highway had broken the old Route 66 business model.
That story was repeated across America.
Restaurants closed.
Gas stations disappeared.
Tourist courts were abandoned.
Neon signs went dark.
Buildings designed specifically to attract highway travelers suddenly stood beside roads that no longer carried enough travelers to support them.
Many vanished.
Wigwam Village No. 6 did not.
The Lewis Family Brings It Back
Chester Lewis died in 1986.
Two years later, Lewis family members renovated the property and reopened the motel.
That decision is largely why we can still experience the place today rather than merely look at photographs of it.
The family preserved the unusual buildings rather than replacing them with conventional motel rooms. The courtyard remained gravel. The basic layout survived. Original architectural details remained remarkably intact.
Vintage automobiles were placed around the property, adding another layer to the sense that a portion of mid-century Route 66 had somehow been preserved.
One of those automobiles was Chester Lewis’s own Studebaker.
The effect is not that of a reconstructed theme park.
The motel is the real thing.
It is an old Route 66 motel that still functions as one.
A National Historic Place
In 2002, Wigwam Village No. 6 was added to the National Register of Historic Places.
Its significance was recognized both for its architecture and for its connection to transportation and Route 66.
The designation acknowledged something larger than fifteen unusual motel rooms.
The Wigwam Village represents an era when American architecture responded directly to the automobile.
Buildings were no longer designed only for people walking along a sidewalk. They had to catch the eye of someone approaching at 40, 50, or 60 miles an hour.
They needed shape.
Color.
Signs.
Neon.
Something memorable.
The Wigwam Village certainly had that.
The National Park Service later helped preserve the property through the Route 66 Corridor Preservation Program.
Only Three Survive
Of the seven Wigwam Villages constructed around the United States, only three survive:
Wigwam Village No. 2 in Cave City, Kentucky;
Wigwam Village No. 6 in Holbrook, Arizona;
and Wigwam Village No. 7 in Rialto/San Bernardino, California.
The Holbrook and California properties both became part of Route 66’s visual mythology.
Today, the Holbrook motel continues operating on the same property at 811 West Hopi Drive.
Travelers can still do what motorists did more than seventy years ago.
They can pull off the highway and spend the night in one of the teepee-shaped rooms.
More Than Roadside Kitsch
It is easy to dismiss places like the Wigwam Motel as roadside kitsch.
Its history certainly includes some of that.
The motel came from an era when businesses freely borrowed romanticized and often inaccurate images of Native American culture to market products and attractions. Even the word “wigwam” in the motel’s name misdescribes the buildings.
That deserves recognition rather than being ignored.
But the motel has acquired another historical meaning.
It tells us something about the America that built Route 66.
It represents independent entrepreneurs trying to persuade passing motorists to stop.
It represents the rise of the family automobile vacation.
It represents the roadside businesses that grew with the old U.S. highway system.
And its near disappearance after the Interstate arrived tells another part of that same story.
The highway created it.
Another highway almost killed it.
Preservation saved it.
A Photograph That Contains a Lot of History
Photographer Carol M. Highsmith took the photograph that prompted my original 2016 post on October 7, 2006, and the Library of Congress preserves it.
In the image, the motel’s white teepees rise against an intensely blue Arizona sky. Old automobiles occupy the gravel lot in front of them. The most prominent is a turquoise late-1950s automobile whose styling belongs unmistakably to the same period that made places like the Wigwam Village successful.
It is almost too perfect a Route 66 scene.
Yet what makes it important is that the scene was not recreated for the photograph.
The buildings are still there.
The motel survived.
And after more than three-quarters of a century, travelers can still arrive in Holbrook, turn off the old Mother Road, and answer the question that generations of motorists saw advertised beside the highway:
“Have you slept in a wigwam lately?”
