Adamana, Arizona

What is Adamana?

Adamana sits in Apache County, in northeastern Arizona, beside the busy freight tracks of the old Santa Fe main line and just west of Petrified Forest National Park. It was never big: a depot, a hotel, a post office and a handful of homes that served the trains and the sightseers. A National Park Service sign near the Puerco River notes that the little whistle-stop is gone, while long freight trains still roll by.

History of Adamana

The name is a squeezed-together form of "Adam Hanna's," the rancher's place that stood here. A post office opened in 1896 and lasted until 1969. Hanna and other early residents shipped carloads of petrified wood east by rail, and the loss of so much wood helped push the government to protect the forest, which became a national monument in 1906.

Around 1905 the naturalist John Muir stayed at Adamana for about a year with his daughters Helen and Wanda, living in a small adobe house beside the Forest Hotel and exploring the fossil beds. In the 1930s the Fred Harvey Company still met trains at the station and drove passengers into the monument in open touring cars. Once good highways, then Route 66 and later Interstate 40, brought visitors by car, the railroad stop lost its purpose and the town faded. The Forest Hotel later burned.

Visiting Adamana: tips

There is nothing to tour in Adamana itself, so treat it as a look from the road and leave anything still standing alone. The nearest interchange is I-40 Exit 303, Adamana Road; plan to buy fuel in Holbrook. The reason to come is the park next door, entered at Exit 311. Inside it, Puerco Ruin and Petroglyphs is about 1.6 miles from Adamana and Newspaper Rock about 1.7 miles, and the Park Service railroad sign near the Puerco River tells the Adamana story with the tracks right in front of you.