SAN BERNARDINO COUNTY
Newberry Springs, California
Interstate 40 and the BNSF main line at Newberry Springs. Ken Lund · CC BY-SA 2.0
An unincorporated Mojave community on old Route 66 and Interstate 40, about 20 miles east of Barstow.
ZIP 92365. The 2000 census counted 2,895 people. The BNSF main line and historic Route 66 both run through town. I-15 and I-40 serve the wider area. The post office name became Newberry Springs in 1967. Camp Cady, on the Mojave Road north of town, was a watering stop for 1850s wagon trains. The local site Discover Newberry Springs is the community's own introduction.
Bagdad Cafe
Bagdad Cafe on Route 66 in Newberry Springs. Guallendra · CC0
The café at 46548 National Trails Highway was the Sidewinder Café before Percy Adlon filmed Bagdad Café here in 1987. It later took the film's name. A 2003 historical marker dates the building to the 1950s and says the restaurant adopted the film title in 1995. The motel that stood with it is gone; the café and the sign remain. It is not the ghost town of Bagdad, about 50 miles east.
Water tanks and the railroad in Newberry Springs, March 2022. Sarah Stierch · CC BY 4.0
The book
Margaret “Bonnie” Orcutt's land was just east of town. Her original driveway reached old Route 66 until an I-40 survey crossed it. See the town from public roads only. The driveway story and the visitor disclaimer come before any detour.
Nearby, with sources
Map · Weather · Road trip
Newberry Springs weather
70°F · Clear · humidity 24% · wind 2 mph
Weather data by Open-Meteo.com (CC BY 4.0). Forecast for 34.8272, -116.6886.
Desert travel safety
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Mrs. Orcutt's Driveway
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More desert history from C. V. Wooster: The King of Quacks (Zzyzx) · When the Birds Go Silent (the Mojave War)
Substack
The parchment, postmarks, stamps, gilt corners, and desert sketches come from C. V. Wooster's presentation for the book. Photographs are credited where they appear. The award seals and the signed manual page are from the author's materials.
Read
The road
Visit & play
The post office names
The U.S. Geological Survey's name record, as the Newberry Springs article on Wikipedia summarizes it, gives this settlement a string of official names rather than one continuous label. A post office called Watson opened in February 1883 and closed that July. The Southern Pacific Railroad then used the name Newberry, and a post office under that name was re-established in 1899. The office was called Wagner in 1911 and Water in 1919. Before 1931 the name was Newberry again. In 1967 the post office name was lengthened so mail would not be mixed up with Newbury Park, near Oxnard.
Where the spring sits
Wikipedia places the community at the foot of the Newberry Mountains in the western Mojave, about 2,000 feet above sea level, about 20 miles east of Barstow, about 40 miles west of Mojave National Preserve, and about 100 miles south of Death Valley National Park. It gives the town an area of 117 square miles. Gerald Waring's 1915 U.S. Geological Survey water-supply paper, which that article cites, describes Newberry Spring as a nineteenth-century camping place and a water source for the Santa Fe Railway. Tank water from this basin is why a railroad stop could exist here at all. The driveway in Mrs. Orcutt's Driveway met the highway that later followed the same corridor. The house is not a public park, and this page does not give a route to the door.
A services district, not a city
Newberry Springs is unincorporated. Wikipedia notes that local parks and firefighting are handled by the Newberry Community Services District, not by an incorporated city hall. County government for everything else sits in San Bernardino. That split is easy to miss and it matters for a reader of the book. A letter about a state freeway was not addressed to a mayor of Newberry, because there was no city government to receive it. The people who could move a survey stake worked for the state highway department and, above them, for the federal road program.
Lakes in a dry valley
The same encyclopedia entry, citing a January 18, 2018 Los Angeles Times archive piece, says thirty-five lakes were created in Newberry Springs. A 2015 Press-Enterprise article, also cited there, describes a water-ski course that can look like a mirage from the highway. Those lakes are private recreation water, not a public beach at the spring, and they are not the watering hole Camp Cady used in the 1850s. The National Trails Highway still carries Route 66 travelers past the town. Interstate 40 carries the through traffic that once had to stop.
Later films in the valley
Bagdad Cafe, filmed here in 1987, has its own section above. Wikipedia also lists later productions that used the valley: the 2015 film Sky, and the 2022 film Don't Worry Darling, which used Volcano House among other desert locations. None of those pictures is Bonnie Orcutt's story. They do show why a camera crew still comes to a place the interstate was built to pass at speed. If you stop, use public businesses and public roads. The driveway in the book is not one of the film locations this page is inviting you to hunt.
Sources for this section
- Wikipedia, Newberry Springs, California (post office names, distances, elevation, the community services district, the lakes citations, and the later film locations)
- Gerald A. Waring, Springs of California, U.S. Geological Survey Water-Supply Paper 338 (1915)
- Newberry Community Services District