What Holbrook is known for

Holbrook is a Navajo County railroad town of 4,858 people at the 2020 census, on Route 66. It is known for Wigwam Village No. 6, where a motel owner built fifteen concrete teepees in 1950 from a patented wigwam design. Route 66 travelers still pull in to sleep inside a patented teepee.

A highway of look-alike motels

Holbrook sits in Navajo, Hopi and Apache country. The Atlantic and Pacific Railroad reached the site, then called Horsehead Crossing, in 1881 and named the new town for its chief engineer, Henry Randolph Holbrook. Route 66 arrived by 1926, and the town became a highway stop.

Route 66 was lined with look-alike motor courts offering the same night’s sleep in every town. Chester Lewis already ran motels along the highway and needed one travelers would remember. In 1938 he passed through Cave City, Kentucky, and found Frank Redford’s patented, wigwam-shaped rooms.

Buying the design

Lewis bought Redford’s plans, paying royalties in radio dimes. He built fifteen concrete-and-steel teepees, opening Wigwam Village No. 6 on Route 66 in 1950. When Interstate 40 bypassed downtown Holbrook in 1974, he closed it. He died in 1986, his children reopened it in 1988, and it entered the National Register of Historic Places in 2002.

What survives

Only three of the seven Wigwam Villages built to Redford’s design are still standing, Wigwam Village No. 6 among them. The Lewis family still runs it, hickory furniture and all, with Chester’s petrified wood in a small museum by the office.

Why it worked

Holbrook did not invent the wigwam motel. Chester Lewis bought the plans and name from a Kentucky owner, paying in radio dimes. The bet paid off because the license outlived the checks. Interstate 40 closed the motel in 1974, but the family that inherited fifteen concrete teepees reopened them in 1988, and National Register listing followed.