Golden Spike National Historic Site

The park preserves Promontory Summit, Utah, where the Central Pacific Railroad and the first Union Pacific Railroad met on May 10, 1869 to complete the first transcontinental railroad, the joining of the rails signified by the driving of a ceremonial golden spike. The line itself was bypassed by the Lucin Cutoff and abandoned in 1904, and its original rails were pulled up in 1942 for the wartime scrap drive. Preservation owes much to Bernice Gibbs Anderson, who founded and led the movement to memorialize the site beginning with local-history articles in 1926; the Golden Spike Association she headed staged its first rails-joining re-enactment on May 10, 1952. The site was authorized as a National Historic Site under non-federal ownership on April 2, 1957, passed to federal ownership and administration by act of Congress on July 30, 1965, and was redesignated Golden Spike National Historical Park on March 12, 2019 under the John D. Dingell Jr. Conservation, Management, and Recreation Act. From an initial 7 acres the park has grown to 2,735 acres, taking in worker campsites, incomplete cuts and grades, the spot where the Central Pacific set its ten-miles-of-track-in-one-day record, and the site of the Big Fill and Big Trestle.