You can actually sleep inside a concrete teepee on Arizona’s Route 66

Holbrook’s Wigwam Motel isn’t a museum

Route 66 is full of old signs and faded paint, but Holbrook has something you can actually sleep in.

Since 1950, the Wigwam Motel has been putting guests to bed inside 15 concrete teepee-shaped rooms arranged around a central office on West Hopi Drive.

The neon “Sleep in a Wigwam” sign flickers on every evening, and people have been pulling off the highway to photograph it for decades.

The centennial year of Route 66 is a good reason to finally stop.

Fifteen white teepees with a red zigzag at the door

Pull into the parking lot and the first thing you notice is the shape. Each room rises into a point, painted white with a red zigzag running above the doorway.

The 15 structures are arranged around a central office, and vintage cars from the 1950s and 1960s sit parked throughout the grounds.

Small green metal benches etched with “Wigwam Village #6” are scattered around the complex. The whole property looks like a postcard from 1955, except the lights are on and the doors are open.

A Kentucky barbecue stand started all of this

The story begins in Long Beach, California, where a man named Frank Redford spotted a teepee-shaped barbecue stand sometime in the early 1930s.

He liked the idea enough to build his own version in Horse Cave, Kentucky, in 1933. Redford patented the design in 1936 and started licensing it.

Arizona motel owner Chester Lewis came across Wigwam Village #2 while driving through Cave City, Kentucky, in 1938 and worked out an unusual deal:

coin-operated radios went in every room, and every dime a guest dropped in for 30 minutes of music went straight to Redford.

The hickory furniture has been there since day one

Step inside a room and the furniture stops you. Every piece is the original handmade hickory that went in when the motel opened in 1950.

The room is simple: a main sleeping area, a small bathroom with a sink, toilet, and shower, and modern air conditioning and satellite TV added along the way.

There are no phones and no ice machines, and that absence feels intentional. Room numbers run one through 16, with 13 skipped entirely.

Nobody seems to know exactly why, and nobody has pushed to find out.

Interstate 40 nearly killed it

Chester Lewis ran the motel well through the 1950s and into the 1960s.

Then Interstate 40 bypassed downtown Holbrook in 1974, and the traffic that had kept the place alive dried up almost overnight. The motel closed.

Lewis died in 1986, and the teepees sat empty for years. His children, Clifton, Paul, and Elinor, came back to the property in 1988, renovated it, and reopened it.

The Lewis family still owns and runs the Wigwam Motel today, more than 70 years after Chester built it.

The office holds a small museum worth your time

When the Lewis family reopened the motel, they converted part of the main office into a museum.

Inside, you’ll find Chester Lewis’s personal collection, Route 66 memorabilia, and pieces of petrified wood gathered over decades. The museum is open to the public, so you don’t need to be a guest to walk through it.

It’s a quick stop, but it gives you the full picture of how this place came to be and what it took to keep it standing.

Only three of the original seven are still standing

Seven Wigwam Villages went up between 1933 and the early 1950s, spread across Kentucky, Alabama, Louisiana, Florida, Arizona, and California. Four of them are gone.

The three that remain are Wigwam Village #2 in Cave City, Kentucky; #6 here in Holbrook; and #7 in the San Bernardino area of California.

All three sit on the National Register of Historic Places.

The Holbrook location received that listing on May 2, 2002, and later got preservation grants from the National Park Service’s Route 66 Corridor Preservation Program in 2003 and 2007.

Route 66 turns 100 this year

U.S. Highway 66 was established on Nov. 11, 1926, which means 2026 is the centennial. All eight states along the route are marking the year with events, festivals, and preservation work.

In Arizona, the annual Route 66 Fun Run runs from Seligman to Topock in May, and communities along the highway are holding events throughout the year.

The Wigwam Motel is one of the most intact surviving stops on the Arizona stretch, which makes this particular year a good time to drive the Mother Road and spend a night in a teepee.

Petrified Forest and Meteor Crater are both close

Holbrook sits inside the Painted Desert, a stretch of layered, colorful rock formations that runs across northeastern Arizona.

Petrified Forest National Park is about 20 miles east, where logs more than 200 million years old have turned to stone and the desert shifts through shades of red, purple, and orange.

Meteor Crater, one of the best-preserved impact craters on Earth, sits roughly 40 miles west. The Grand Canyon is farther but still within a day’s drive to the northwest.

The motel puts you in the middle of all of it.

Holbrook has its own rough history worth knowing

Before Route 66 put Holbrook on the map, the town had a reputation as one of the rougher cattle towns in the Arizona Territory.

One downtown street still carries the name Bucket of Blood, after a deadly bar fight from the cowboy era.

The Navajo County Historical Museum, inside the old county courthouse, walks you through that frontier history and into the Route 66 years.

Downtown still has vintage signage, murals, and roadside touches that give the town its own reason to stop, separate from the motel.

Local shops sell petrified wood you can legally take home

The land around Holbrook sits on some of the richest deposits of petrified wood in the country, and you cannot remove so much as a pebble from Petrified Forest National Park.

But several shops in the area sell legally sourced specimens, and Jim Gray’s Petrified Wood Company has been a family-run stop for decades.

Inside, you’ll find everything from raw chunks of ancient wood to polished stone jewelry, along with fossils, dinosaur statues, and Native American artifacts.

It’s the legal way to leave with a piece of Arizona’s prehistoric past.

A working piece of American roadside history

Most things from 1950 are in a case somewhere with a label. The Wigwam Motel is not.

You check in, park next to a car that’s older than you are, and sleep inside a concrete teepee that’s been standing for 75 years.

The northern Arizona desert goes quiet at night and the sky opens up in a way that’s hard to get used to.

There’s no better year to do it than this one, with Route 66 hitting its centennial and the road drawing travelers from across the country.

Book a teepee room at the Wigwam Motel in Arizona

The Wigwam Motel sits at 811 West Hopi Drive in Holbrook, Arizona, right on Route 66. There are 15 teepee rooms available, along with modern apartments for larger groups.

Check-in is at 3 p.m., and if you’re arriving after 9 p.m., contact the motel ahead of time. The property is pet-friendly, with an additional nightly fee.

With only 15 rooms, it fills up fast, especially in spring and fall. Check the official website for current rates and to book your room before someone else does.

This article was created with AI assistance and human editing.

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