I have driven Interstate 40 east of Barstow more times than I can count, even using all my toes and fingers, but I had never heard of the longest personal driveway in the United States being just a few hundred feet north of the roadway.
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| Just a short section of the longest driveway in America |
While attending an event at Roy’s Hotel and Cafe in Amboy a few months ago, a gentleman asked me if I had ever visited Mrs. Orcutt’s driveway. I thought it was a personal question, but since I did not know any Mrs. Orcutt, I told him no.
He then went on to explain that in Newberry Springs, there is a four-mile-long driveway that runs parallel to Interstate 40 all the way to the remains of Mrs. Orcutt’s home.
This sounded intriguing, and I knew that it was a place to investigate - I like finding places to investigate.
According to author C.V. Wooster’s book, Mrs. Orcutt’s Driveway, recently published in June of 2025, Margaret ‘Bonnie’ Orcutt was not a woman to mess around with.
Born on September 7th, 1909, in Boone County, Indiana, to Wolford and Fern McMains, Bonnie would stay there until she was three years old and then moved with her family to Indianapolis, where her father owned a car dealership. In 1927, the family moved again to Richmond, Indiana, where her father’s new dealership was really taking off. This era was the true birth of America’s love affair with the automobile.
Watching her father’s work ethic made Bonnie realize that to be successful, she had to search out and go after things of interest for her. She was eclectic in those areas - botany, music, faith, science, and many other avenues.
In fact, she attended numerous schools of higher learning, including Earlham College, Butler University, DePauw University, and the Arthur Jordan Conservatory of Music. She was such a dedicated student of music that it was said she had reached a concert-level proficiency as a harpist.
And it was that harp playing in 1948 that introduced Bonnie to her future husband, Kenneth Orcutt.
He heard her play, and it was all over for him except for the church bells. Their courtship lasted just a short time, and they were married.
This research was going along well until I read that Kenneth had been killed in an air crash in 1953 in the state of Iowa at the young age of 33.
Margaret ‘Bonnie’ Orcutt was now a widow. And she moved west all the way to Newberry Springs the same year her husband had died.
She purchased a hundred acres just northeast of Newberry Springs, built a small but comfortable adobe home, and even hand-dug a 14-foot-deep, quarter-mile pond with a small island in the middle and filled it with fish.
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| A section of the adobe wall of Mrs. Orcutt's home |
It was a quiet life, and that was the way she wanted it. Time to learn all the desert had to offer her.
Then, in 1964, government surveyors - yeah, the government - started putting boundary stakes across the southern end of her property.
“Interstate 40 is coming, Bonnie, and you'd better get out of the way,” one of the surveyors may have said.
So, Bonnie had a conundrum; the stakes for the new highway indicated that the road she used to drive into Newberry Springs would no longer be there. Lanes of newly poured asphalt would block her only exit from her home.
She did not want to sell, and she said so, but the stakes kept getting pounded into her beloved desert soil.
A typewriter seemed to always be clicking away inside Bonnie’s house, as she contacted this person and that person, demanding that the interstate not cut through her property. She wrote letter after letter and supposedly even wrote to President Lyndon Johnson and then Mrs. President Lady Bird Johnson - a rumor is she sent a few to Santa Claus.
It paid off, and the government agreed to pay $100,000 to build a four-mile private driveway from the new offramp at National’s Trails Highway to her house. Of course, the government men insisted that it was actually their driveway, but since Bonnie’s home was the only one at the end of the long black asphalt, she only nodded and smiled.
It was such a straight and wide road, and still is, that people started coming out and drag-racing on it - in the 1970s and 1980s, the magazine, Car and Driver, wrote about this driveway and folks started using it to test for speed.
In 1984, the magazine conducted the last test on the roadway with a modified Pontiac Trans Am, which reached the speed of 204 mph.
That is fast.
In 1986, Bonnie Orcutt passed away, and the property has fallen onto some pretty hard times with the sun beating down, and the winds blowing through sometimes with nearly hurricane force.
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| What is left of Mrs. Orcutt's home in Newberry Springs |
After learning of the history of the property and the feisty, government-fighting woman, I knew a trip was needed to check things out.
No GPS is needed - head east on Interstate 40, take the National Trails Highway exit for Newberry Springs, make a stop at the end of the ramp, turn left, go around the Chevron Station to Pioneer Road, and there you are. Opposite if you are heading west, obviously.
The road, no matter the reports, is in pretty good shape and straight as an arrow for the whole four miles.
At the end is a large circular cul-de-sac, and to the right is what remains of Mrs. Orcutt’s adobe home. Not much, but with imagination, as you walk about the property, images of better days come to mind.
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| The end of the driveway in front of Mrs. Orcutt's home |
It must have been a comfortable home with sidewalks, what looks like the possible remains of a front yard fountain, a couple of outbuildings, and, of course, the huge empty pool in the back yard.
As cars and trucks streaked by on Interstate 40 less than a hundred yards away, I wondered what it must have been like for this strong woman to live alone in what could be referred to as a pretty desolate stretch of desert.
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| Remains of Mrs. Orcutt's home showing the rear yard |
Did she still play the harp? Did she write letters on her typewriter to friends and family back east? Did she have a fulfilling social life in the Mojave Desert?
I wandered and pondered - and hoped she had.
For further information:
https://www.amazon.com/Mrs-Orcutts-Driveway-Legendary-Unstoppable-ebook/dp/B0DN9R8KVN
John can be reached at beyersbyways@gmail.com
