Mrs Orcutt Newberry Springs Ca Route 66 hell of a story

[masraum]

Mrs Orcutt was a woman in the 60s that got stuff done! Sounds like a hell of a woman! She got the gov't to build her a 4 mile road/driveway because they built an interstate that blocked her access to Route 66 and Newberry Springs. She even got the name of the town changed from "Newberry" to "Newberry Springs" without the town knowing that she was going to do it according to the video below.


There was a thread on this in the 911 Tech forum 20 years ago, but with less info.
https://forums.pelicanparts.com/porsche-911-technical-forum/80061-slightly-ot-im-looking-mrs-orcutts-driveway.html

This guy has a ~12 min video with some interesting bits of info even if he isn't the most polished YTer out there.


C&D article

Not too long after President John F. Kennedy pleaded with Americans to "ask not what your country can do for you," a California widow asked the country to do something for her, and the country did it.

One day, bulldozers arrived at her hardscrabble homestead up in the high Mojave Desert 135 miles northeast of Los Angeles to build her a driveway—straight as an axle shaft except for one little kink, meticulously paved with tar and crushed stones from end to tessellated end, and 4.1 miles long.

The road belonged to the government, but as the sole resident living on it at the time, it was basically hers. It led through the yucca and creosote bushes and across a primeval lake bed to a rustic ranch compound with a grove of honey mesquite trees and a duck pond. Eventually, the car magazines found it like ants find a dropped lollipop.

From the late '70s to the mid-'80s, Mrs. Orcutt's driveway was where Car and Driver sneaked off to test cars at speeds as illegal as a bank robbery. Gale Banks built a Trans Am that did over 200 mph there at the pointy end of a dust cloud visible for miles. A Cadillac Seville, hiding a tube-frame stock-car chassis and a twin-turbo Chevy 454 V-8, lost a chrome bumper at over 100.

Slicked up with sunscreen, we dipped into the driver's seat of a $332,875 Lamborghini Murciélago roadster—an ideal car for rediscovering high-speed roads—and rumbled north on Interstate 15 out of Los Angeles.

That is, after spending 45 minutes to figure out how to remove the roadster's canvas top, which didn't have instructions and which is only slightly less complicated than a Bailey bridge. Removing it wasn't an option, however, because a placard affixed to the windshield header warns in big letters against exceeding 100 mph with the convertible top in place.

Will the roof come apart at high speeds? Apparently. For a normal car, 100 mph is a rapid speed. For a Lamborghini Murciélago, it's second gear. If the roadster were as fast as the coupe [C/D, July 2003], then the 572-hp V-12 should launch it to 60 mph in 3.8 seconds and to the roof-shredding 100 mark in 9.5 seconds, barely a few quick breaths' worth.

We couldn't verify that it is as fast, however, because the first full-throttle stomp produced the requisite hearty roar from the 6.2-liter V-12 but barely any speed change. With 4000 hard miles already on its clock, the roadster's clutch had already seen its best days. At half-gas (ample to fling the Lambo past traffic) the clutch hung on, so we continued. The Lamborghini is old-school supercar, both electrifying and exhausting. It features a manly weight to the controls and startlingly fierce rips from the exhaust pipes. It smacks hard over bumps, and the wind pummels you at speed. Everyone-and we mean everyone-stares. Only the most dedicated, persevering showoffs need apply.

San Bernardino and the regional highway agency, Caltrans District 8, was the first stop. Michael Lofy, senior transportation surveyor, had the government's story. According to Lofy's files, one Bonnie Margaret McMains Orcutt, husband "killed" in unknown circumstances, purchased 100 acres just east of Newberry Springs in the mid-'50s. She built a low house of a half-dozen rooms. She dug a 14-foot-deep, quarter-mile-long pond and stocked it with fish. She staged motocross races on the property to raise money for her Cywren Foundation, which envisioned building a maternity hospital on the ranch for unwed mothers.

She established, as Lofy says, "her own kind of empire out there." A few years later the empire found itself lying in the concrete path of progress. In 1964, government surveyors plotting a new freeway from Barstow to Needles ran the highway a half-mile south of her front door, right across her original driveway from the ranch to old Route 66. The government offered $106,000 for the whole property or a smaller settlement for the loss of the driveway. It did not offer to build her a new one. In the plan, the closest freeway exit would be four miles back. Unless the government built her a road to that exit or her own personal off-ramp, Interstate 40 threatened to cut off Casa Orcutt from the outside world.

No dumb Indiana girl was Margaret Orcutt. She'd spent a year at Earlham Col*lege in Richmond, Indiana, before trans*ferring to DePauw University in Green*castle in 1929. She didn't want to sell out, and she knew how to punch a typewriter. She fired off letters with attached photo to her state representatives, to California Gov. Edmund G. Brown, and to Pres. Lyndon Johnson, pleading for her own exit or a new driveway to the nearest exit. The letters spoke of grand business venture including a "wild game refuge," a "beau*tiful 100-unit desert retirement home for senior citizens," and the expansion of her business (called the Littlest Lumberyard and by all evidence a dollhouse supply operation), "thus providing employment for many people out here."

"Realizing your love of beauty," she fawned to Lady Bird Johnson, the First Lady of wildflowers, "I am taking the lib*erty of writing to ask for your kind help."

If somebody called somebody, Lofy has no record. What Lofy does have is a 1965 letter from a highway engineer rec*ommending that the Division of Highways spend an extra $101,000 to build Mrs. Orcutt a road from her property to the Fort Cady Road overpass, 4.1 miles to the west. Construction of "Mrs. Orcutt's driveway" was completed by the summer of 1968. The road was deeded to San Bernardino County for maintenance and patrol, but no maintenance and, as we know, precious little patrolling went on there. Lofy can't say exactly what the road would cost today, but a million per mile is a safe esti*mate.

Former C/D editor Don Sherman is credited with having discovered the place, and in our June 1984 issue, in which we reported on that Banks Trans Am, he wrote a sidebar about the driveway called "C/D's 200-mph Highway."

From the moment a test crew showed up—anywhere from two guys in a single car to 20 with a full race transporter—prac*tically everything they did was illegal and usually dangerous. Especially the high*-speed runs past some brave fool (typically, long-serving road warrior Dana Barton) holding a radar gun.

And except for one cop who demanded a ride in the Trans Am [see sidebar, below] and one person who waved a shotgun at the test crew ("That may have been me," says neighbor and current Orcutt property owner Jack Poland), no one, including Margaret, ever complained about wailing engines, 100-foot burnout stripes, or fast*-moving dust clouds.

Our own speed down her driveway this day topped out at a blistering 10 mph—*the car shuddered over potholes and scraped its belly across depressions where the lake bed has subsided, taking the pave*ment with it. Behind a wall of overgrowth and several "No Trespassing" signs are the last vestiges of her house, the place strewn with garbage, shotgun shells, and rodent droppings. The lake is a crusty pit, the mesquite trees a wild gnarl of limbs. The hospital, the senior-citizen home, the employment for many people—none of this ever happened. Ragged papers found in the ruin by one of Mrs. Orcutt's neighbors show that she probably died soon after the Trans Am test in 1984. She served on the local water board and feared God and Communism to equal degree. Spike Lynch, who pulled the paper shreds of her life from the mud, remembers only that Margaret Orcutt "was a tiny thing, probably four foot seven. A real pistol."

She would have loved the Lamborghini.