Henry R. Holbrook

The town wears the name of a man who almost certainly never saw it. Henry R. Holbrook was chief engineer of the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad's western division, and when the tracks reached the Little Colorado in 1881, contractor John W. Young fixed the engineer's name to the new depot. Holbrook the man stayed east with the survey work; Holbrook the town grew into a rowdy Hashknife cattle stop where the railroad, not its namesake, wrote the future. Railroads scattered such borrowed names across the West like ballast.

What the plaque says

Chief Engineer of the Western Div. of the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad. Town named by John W. Young contractor for the railroad. 24 September 1881.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Holbrook — steps away
  A Santa Fe railroad town once too tough for women and churches, now the seat of Navajo County, gateway to the Petrified Forest, and home to the concrete teepees of the Wigwam Motel.
• Petrified Forest National Park — 26 mi
  Two hundred million years turned to stone — and a Route 66 ghost

More markers nearby

• Navajo County Courthouse — 0.2 mi
• Wigwam Village #6 — 0.5 mi
• Little Colorado River Bridge — 0.8 mi
• The Old Fort — 9.8 mi