As an innovative restaurateur and marketer, Fred Harvey is credited with creating the first restaurant chain in the United States.

Fred Harvey and his employees successfully brought new higher standards of both civility and dining to a region widely regarded in the era as "the Wild West."

[1] Despite the decline of passenger train patronage in the United States in the 20th century with the advent of the automobile, portions of the Fred Harvey Company have continued to operate since 1968 as part of a larger hospitality industry conglomerate.

[2] Frederick Henry Harvey was born to mixed Scottish and English parents, and immigrated into the United States from Liverpool, England, in 1853 at the age of 17.

He moved from New York to New Orleans after 18 months, where he survived a bout with yellow fever, and then to St. Louis where he worked in a jewelry store.

[5] Harvey discovered his calling when in 1873, he began a business venture with Jasper "Jeff" S. Rice to set up two eating houses two hundred and eighty miles apart along the Kansas Pacific Railroad, but once again the partnership was doomed.

Of course he had to make his profit or he could not stay in business and therefore this story was told rather reverently by his employees and other denizens of the Southwest spaces.

His "Indian Detours" were meant to provide an authentic Native American experience by having actors stage a certain lifestyle in the desert in order to sell tickets to unwitting tourists.

[13] A movie musical entitled The Harvey Girls, starring Judy Garland, Cyd Charisse and Angela Lansbury, and based on a near-pulp novel by Samuel Hopkins Adams, was made in 1946.

In the 1995 steampunk alternate history novel The Two Georges by Richard Dreyfuss and Harry Turtledove, Harvey is mentioned in the first chapter as having been in the business of airships in addition to railroads.