How Free Roadside Campgrounds Became America’s First Motels

When there were no motels, travelers crossing the country overnight had to find a field to pitch their tent and park their car. From 1915 to 1925, hundreds of towns across America established low-cost or free auto camps in public parks. Auto camps offered water spigots, fire rings, and latrines. Communities hoped that travelers would break their journey, visit the town, and make purchases. However, by the mid-1920s, problems of overcrowding and unsanitary conditions led many auto camps to close, allowing the opportunity for private enterprise to fill in.

In 1920, Denver, Colorado, opened a free municipal campground called Overland Park and really took the idea to the next level. It had over 800 marked campsites, electric lights, hot showers, a laundry room, a grocery store, a post office, and a three-story clubhouse. A free operation of that size was quite impressive, and it proved to private investors that travelers were looking for clean, well-organized places to stay.

By 1925 or so, independent operators along paved highways erected their own “tourist cabins,” little wooden shacks that rented for about $1 per night. Also known as cottage courts, they had beds, locked doors, and parking spaces just outside the door, the essential elements of what we know as a motel today. Most lacked indoor plumbing, and guests would walk outside to a common bathhouse. Not luxurious, but among the first lodgings built specifically for motorists, offering a simple paid alternative to the free auto camps and roadside tents travelers had relied on before.

Pasadena, California, architect Arthur Heineman opened the Milestone Mo-Tel on December 12, 1925. Located in San Luis Obispo, California, on the highway between Los Angeles and San Francisco, it was the world’s first motor hotel designed for that purpose. It was built in Spanish Colonial style, with red tile roofs and private garages off each room. Heineman coined the name Mo-Tel, a portmanteau of motor and hotel. His application for a trademark on the name was rejected, making it a generic term available for use by others.

The first Alamo Plaza Hotel Court was founded in 1929 in Waco, Texas, by Edgar Lee Torrance and Drummond Bartlett, two businessmen who created what would become the nation’s first motel chain. Because each location featured a copy of the Alamo Mission facade from San Antonio, travelers could easily spot them while on the road. They brought in Beautyrest mattresses, installed in-room phones by 1936, and even added swimming pools. There were over 20 properties across the South.

In 1933, a handful of West Coast motel owners formed United Motor Courts, the first non-profit referral organization for motor courts in the United States. Rather than consolidate into a single chain, owners retained their own individual courts. Members inspected each other’s facilities to ensure cleanliness standards were maintained. When travelers reached the end of the line at one motel, they were referred on to another. By 1937, UMC operated nearly 300 member courts. This was proof that smaller operators could compete without giving up ownership.

In 1936, Victor Hugo Green, a Harlem postal worker, published the first Negro Motorist Green Book in New York City. During the era of Jim Crow segregation, Black motorists were likely to be rejected, harassed, or worse if they stopped in what were called “sundown towns,” which forbade them from remaining after dark. Green compiled his travel guide with the help of fellow postal carriers. The guide included Black-owned and friendly white-owned motels, tourist homes, service stations, and eateries en route. The guide remained in publication for 30 years until 1966.

A Kentucky builder named Frank Redford constructed the first Wigwam Village in Horse Cave, Kentucky, from 1933 to 1935. The motel featured concrete teepee-shaped cabins with individual parking spaces. He patented his design in 1936 and built another Wigwam Village in Cave City a year later. Several more Wigwam Villages were either built or franchised throughout the US. Despite the name, the Wigwam Villages were modeled after the Plains teepees, not the dome-shaped wigwams used by Algonquian tribes.

The El Vado Auto Court, located on Central Avenue in Albuquerque, New Mexico, was built in 1937 by Daniel Murphy, an Irishman who had managed hotels. Murphy bet that Route 66 would run next door soon. It was built in a Spanish Pueblo Revival style with curved adobe-like walls, exposed wooden roof beams and carports between units. The 32-unit court gave travelers from the East Coast an idea of what the Southwest was like, while providing safe parking long before a pool was added.

Back in 1939, Arthur and Ilda Boots opened their Boots Court in Carthage, Missouri, right at the intersection of Routes 66 and 71. Constructed in a modernist Streamline Moderne design, it boasted black glass trim, rounded corners, and green neon signage that proudly proclaimed “A Radio in Every Room.” The motel was modest at first but expanded in subsequent years. Actor Clark Gable even spent more than one night there in the 1940s.

Carpenter W.A. Huggins began construction on Blue Swallow Court in March 1939. Located on Route 66 in Tucumcari, New Mexico, the motel featured a pink stucco exterior accented with shell motifs and wooden garages flanking the original ten rooms, each with its own space where guests could secure their vehicles. Lillian Redman purchased the motel in 1958, renaming it Blue Swallow Motel, and installed the iconic neon bird sign.

In 1939, seven motor court owners in Daytona Beach, Florida, started a marketing group. In 1941, the association changed its name to Quality Courts United, a non-profit referral cooperative. This wasn’t a franchise at that point, but the members had to follow the organization’s standards. Members agreed to provide fresh linens each day, wall-to-wall carpeting, telephones in rooms, and 24-hour front desks. The members all used a shared sunburst sign to show they were part of the group. Room rates averaged $3.21 per night. Quality Courts went on to grow and eventually become Choice Hotels International.

Coral Court, a motel on Route 66 in Marlborough, Missouri, was developed by John Carr and designed by St. Louis architect Adolph Struebig. It opened in early 1942 and was built in the Art Deco style, with honey-colored glazed tile and glass block windows. Each room had its own private, enclosed garage with sliding doors that enabled guests to pull in and vanish out of view. Its secluded nature made it a local legend and a staple of local gossip. The site was demolished in 1995, although one of the bungalows survives in a museum in St. Louis.

In 1946, M.K. Guertin, the owner of a motel in Long Beach, California, founded Best Western Motels. Instead of creating a company that people could purchase franchises from, he formed a non-profit organization called a referral network, bringing together 23 independent operators in the western US. Front desk clerks would either telephone ahead for reservations or direct customers to the next available motel listed in the Best Western guidebook. There were 699 Best Western motels by 1963. The members pooled their advertising resources, but remained independent property owners rather than being a part of a franchise business.

After the war ended, motel owners throughout America began constructing swimming pools in their courtyards. They were sited close to the road to catch motorists’ attention. The presence of children playing in these pools provided an effective form of advertising for a business that catered to people in hot, cramped cars with nowhere to rest at the end of the day. By 1952, it was practically impossible to join the ranks of large national chains without one.

After being squeezed for every nickel on a family vacation, Memphis builder Kemmons Wilson decided to start his own hotel chain. The first Holiday Inn opened on Summer Avenue in Memphis, Tennessee, on August 1, 1952. A draftsman, Eddie Bluestein, jokingly wrote “Holiday Inn” in reference to the old Bing Crosby movie. Wilson’s concept offered clean rooms, air conditioning, free TV, a pool, and no extra charge for children. The chain expanded to nearly 1,000 hotels by 1968.

In 1952, Kemmons Wilson, founder of the Holiday Inn hotel chain, hired Gene Barber and Roland Alexander to design the hotel’s signature sign. The two were then working as sketch artists for a local Memphis sign company called Balton & Sons. Their 50-foot Great Sign had green-and-gold neon lettering, a flashing yellow arrow, and a red starburst. It was designed so that someone driving by at highway speeds would be able to spot it and still have time to pull off the road into a Holiday Inn. The Great Sign hung outside Holiday Inns all over the U.S. until it was retired in 1982.

The restaurant business Howard Johnson began running in Massachusetts in 1925 took on new dimensions when he opened his first Howard Johnson’s Motor Lodge in Savannah, Georgia, in 1954. Built right next to his roadside restaurants near new highway interchanges, these hotels could be spotted from a distance by their distinctive orange, porcelain roofs and turquoise spires. With the promise of a good meal and a guaranteed bed, they grew to more than 500 locations by the late 1970s.

Roy Crowl opened Roy’s in 1938 as a small gas stop on Route 66 in the sleepy town of Amboy, deep in the Mojave Desert of California. His son-in-law, Herman “Buster” Burris, would later add the guest cabins, a repair shop, and a round-the-clock diner. In 1959, Burris completed the facility with a reception lobby and a neon sign that towered high enough to be seen for miles from the ground below.

In the late 1950s, architects along the road began to spread a style known as Googie throughout Southern California. Googie’s buildings were shaped by jet age and space age aspirations; they featured a cantilevered upswept roof, boomerang shapes, starburst motifs, and towering neon marquees designed to be readable at a glance from a car traveling at highway speeds. In other words, Googie signaled modern comfort before a car even stopped. Googie remained the quintessential roadside design for nearly ten years, which was another milestone in the car’s reinvention of what a motel looked like.

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