Goffs, California

01How a Railroad Town Named Blake Became Goffs

The settlement was founded in 1893 as Blake, named for Isaac Blake, the financier and builder of the Nevada Southern Railway. The line commenced at this spot, pushing north off the Atlantic and Pacific (later Santa Fe) main line to reach the mining country around Vanderbilt and Searchlight. In 1895 the route was reorganized as the California Eastern Railway, which operated until 1923. The town took the name Goffs in 1902.

For roughly three decades, Goffs functioned as a classic desert division point. Santa Fe crews lived here, locomotives took on water, and the surrounding scatter of Homer, Fenner, Blackburn, and Purdy absorbed the overflow of railroad workers and their families. The schoolhouse built in 1914 served children from across that dispersed community, one of the few one-room schools ever to operate on the Mojave's volcanic tablelands.

When the National Old Trails Road was absorbed into the new U.S. Route 66 in 1926, Goffs suddenly became a motor stop as well as a rail stop. Tourists, Dust Bowl migrants, and truckers rolled through on their way to Needles or Barstow, and a general store on the highway grew into the town's largest building. The boom lasted five years.

02What Happened to Goffs, California?

In 1931 the Route 66 alignment was straightened. A new, faster highway was punched through between Needles and Essex, bypassing Goffs and the northern loop entirely. Traffic evaporated almost overnight. The old pavement, now known as Goffs Road, became a 40-mile desert detour past the already-vanishing settlements of Bannock, Ibis, and Homer. Without through-travelers, the general store, garage, and cafes that had sprung up along the strip lost their customers. The railroad itself was shrinking: diesel locomotives needed fewer water stops, and the California Eastern had already been abandoned eight years earlier.

Goffs might have faded entirely in the 1930s had the Army not arrived. In 1942, Major General George S. Patton selected the surrounding 18,000 square miles for the Desert Training Center, the largest military training ground in U.S. history, built to prepare American troops for combat against Rommel's Afrikakorps in North Africa. Camp Goffs became one of its support nodes: an ammunition depot three miles south near Goffs Butte, several large warehouses, an emergency airfield one mile north, and an evacuation hospital. The 7th Motorized Division was headquartered here for three months in 1942 before shipping out to fight in the Aleutians, Kwajalein, Leyte, and Okinawa. At peak, roughly 15,000 soldiers passed through the camps surrounding the hamlet.

The Desert Training Center closed in May 1944. The Army left, the camps were dismantled, and Goffs returned to its handful of railroad families. By the time the schoolhouse finally closed and the building began to collapse in the 1950s and 1960s, the town was effectively a ghost.

03The Schoolhouse That Refused to Die

Most Mojave ghost towns lose their last building to a single fire, a scrapper, or a winter flash flood. Goffs lost its general store exactly that way on June 8, 2021, when the century-old wooden structure burned to the ground. But the schoolhouse took a different path.

By the early 1980s the 1914 building was nearly gone, roof sagging, adobe-plastered walls eroding back into the desert. In 1993 a group of desert historians formed the Mojave Desert Heritage and Cultural Association, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, specifically to save it. They rebuilt the schoolhouse to its original plans and, on October 11, 2001, saw it placed on the National Register of Historic Places — one of the few Route 66 buildings in California to receive that distinction and reportedly the only one-room schoolhouse in all of Southern California on the Register.

Today the MDHCA grounds at 37198 Lanfair Road function as an outdoor museum. The schoolhouse interior interprets local mining history; the surrounding yard holds an accumulating archive of desert artifacts — stamp mills, ore cars, railroad signage, vehicles, and salvaged fragments from the surrounding camps. The association also maintains an oral history program, a historic photograph collection, and a desert book library.

04Can You Visit Goffs Today?

Yes, and it is one of the more rewarding stops on the old Route 66 alignment. Goffs lies at an elevation of 2,595 feet, reached via Goffs Road off Interstate 40 at either the Fenner or U.S. 95 exits. ZIP code 92332 still functions. The MDHCA site is open on a limited schedule; hours shift seasonally and the grounds may be closed during extreme summer heat, so checking ahead is wise.

The surrounding Mojave National Preserve protects much of the land that the Santa Fe and the Army once used, and the desert tortoise population that earned Goffs its unofficial capital-of designation is federally threatened — meaning any tortoise encountered on the road should be given wide space and never picked up.

05What Remains of Goffs Today

The restored 1914 schoolhouse stands as the anchor of the settlement, flanked by the MDHCA's open-air museum of mining and military artifacts. The general store site is now a burn scar. Traces of Camp Goffs — concrete pads, rock alignments, tank tracks faintly legible from the air — persist on the BLM and preserve lands surrounding the hamlet. The Santa Fe main line still runs through, and freight trains rumble past the schoolhouse daily, a reminder that Goffs was built for steel wheels long before it was built for tires.

A handful of residents remain. The post office has been closed for decades, though 92332 survives as a mailing ZIP. For travelers willing to leave the interstate, Goffs offers something most desert ghost towns cannot: continuity. The story is being actively told here, in a building that was nearly lost, by people who chose to put it back.