For more than 50 years the name MacKenzie was synonymous with first-rate restaurants in Jamestown, North Dakota.
It began in downtown Jamestown in the 1930s with the Moline Cafe, owned by Ralph E. MacKenzie and his wife, Josephine. Their counter-and-booth storefront restaurant, complete with soda fountain, served customers from 5:00 a.m. to 11:30 p.m. and advertised itself as the “Best for Many Miles.”
But with the passage of the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, which authorized the construction of 41,000 miles of interstate highways in the United States, opportunity came knocking in the form of Interstate 94. One of the first four-lane ”superhighways” to be built under the new law, I-94 was to run more than 350 miles east–west through the southern half of North Dakota. The MacKenzies started scouting for a location for the new restaurant they had in mind and soon settled on the spot in Jamestown where U.S. Route 281, a north-south federal highway, met I-94.
Mac’s Restaurant opened at that high-traffic location in 1961. Open every day from 7 a.m. to midnight (except for Sunday, when it closed at 8:30 p.m.), Mac’s was a hit from the beginning. Locals knew the food would be worth a short drive, and billboards up and down the highway brought in thousands of hungry travelers who could choose between a quick bite to eat in the coffee shop or a sit-down meal in the dining room. This, to be sure, was no truck stop: Waiters in white dinner jackets and black bow ties made their way around the dining room with napkins draped over their arms.
In 1964 Charles A. (Chuck) MacKenzie and his wife, Elna, moved from Manderson, Wyoming, where they both were working as teachers, to help run his parents’ restaurant in Jamestown.
But soon came a threat in the form of the Highway Beautification Act of 1965, the landmark legislation championed by Lady Bird Johnson, the wife of President Lyndon B. Johnson, that was intended to improve the aesthetic quality of the nation’s highways by addressing such issues as billboards, junkyards, and roadside landscaping. As for billboards, the new law limited their size, spacing, and proximity to interstate and federal-aid primary highways. More specifically, it aimed to control all outdoor advertising within 650 of the edge of the right-of-way.
At a public hearing convened by the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Bureau of Public Roads in Bismarck, the state capital, Charles MacKenzie testified that billboards had played a big role in the success of Mac’s Restaurant in its five years in business. “We feel that roadside advertising is very important to our operation,” he said at the hearing.
Chuck and Elna MacKenzie continued running Mac’s Restaurant until 1976, when they sold it to buyers who would apparently keep it for only a couple of years. The restaurant was sold again in 1978 and became the Wagon Masters Restaurant. Since 2008 an outpost of the Pizza Ranch chain of buffet restaurants has occupied the same location.
Chuck MacKenzie died in 2005 at age 77; Elna died in 2023 at age 87.