Utah - Day 7 - Golden Spike and Salt Lake City

Salt Lake City KOA, Salt Lake City

Thursday, 7 October 2021

today's route

Leaving last night's campground, I stayed on US-89, partly to avoid the interstate but mostly to see a little more of what's around here.  And what's around here are produce stands.

I must have seen at least a dozen fruit and vegetable stands along the road, as I did yesterday driving north toward Brigham City.  And they were being heavily patronized.  I wanted to stop at any of them but didn't know they were there until I was on top of them and didn't have room to stop.  Most of them had vast displays of pumpkins, but their signs said they had tomatoes and grapes and other produce.

I passed quite a few orchards, though I couldn't recognize the types of fruit trees from the road.

Golden Spike National Historical Monument

The National Park Service offered a wide variety of exhibits for all kinds of learners.  I watched a 20-minute video that was interesting and well-done.  I read a bunch of posters and signs and looked at artifacts from the period.  I watched them drive a pair of period locomotives up the track to demonstrate what the original ceremony might have looked like.  I listened to a park ranger explain things that the exhibits hadn't covered.  And I learned a lot.  Here're some of the exhibits I saw that told me why this site is important to American history.

It began outside the front door.

The bison:

This first section, about the bison vs the railroad, is not for the squeamish.  If I'd known, I wouldn't have read the signs, but now that I have, I'm including them here because they're History, and History ain't always pretty.

a statue of a bison in his summer coat

I show the pieces of this sign below, but include it here for the photo of the bison.

the main caption

bison carcasses

"sportsmen" "hunting"

The building:

More pleasant to me was the building itself.

I was sure there was something odd about
these stones, and I was right.

So that rock is unusual.

The monument:

And of course there's the monument - you may have seen pictures of this in its original position.

the monument where it started out

why it mattered

mistakes in first placement and in first restoration

where it is now, all restored

Building the railroad:

The background:

From 1862 to 1869:

The ceremony - then . . .

. . . and now.

These 2 locomotives came out of the engine barn while I was there to demonstrate what the ceremony might have looked like - minus all the people in period clothing, of course.

The 1901 cut-off:

After using the original route for 30 years, topography determined that the railroads had to make a change.

The original route is the black line, and
the proposed new route is in red.

Another result was that the original route became a branch line with only one or two trains a week coming through.  The towns that had depended on the railroad became ghost towns, and by 1942, the line had been completely abandoned.

During WWII, the steel rails were pulled up and used mainly at military facilities.  But in honor of the original significance of the line, officials held a ceremony for the "undriving" of the last spike at Promontory Summit in September 1942.

The 1950s upgrade:

There was one final modification to this railroad line, this one in the 1950s.

Standardized time:

This little exhibit on a far-reaching effect of railroading hadn't ever occurred to me.

The caption reads:
The image of a conductor swinging out
from the caboose, pocket watch in hand,
became a familiar sight to Americans.
A strong connection between railroads and
timekeeping emerged and was strengthened
as the 19th century gave way to the 20th:
railroad time became America's time.

So we're all still operating on railroad time.  Did you know this?

Materials:

This is something else I didn't know - maybe not so far-reaching but still interesting.

We're still using this "T" rail today.

I think this is supposed to show the development
not only in size but also in shape - pear vs "T".

Engineering for water:

Okay, I was raised in cities, but I've lived in some underdeveloped areas and it still never occurred to me that trains and those who worked on them needed to find their own sources of water.

Of course those building the railroad needed
a lot of water - they were doing hard manual
labor in the desert in the summer.

The trains themselves were steam
locomotives and water was
essential to their function.

Passengers getting off at stops to refill
the engine helped encourage merchants
to set up shop there.  Diesel engines
that didn't need to stop turned the water
stop towns into ghost towns.

And dealing with the snow:

Every state in the Union gets snow, but the mountainous states get more than the trains could cope with.  So the railroads built snow sheds.

37 miles.

By no means least, the workers themselves:

On both sides of the construction, lack of available workers almost made the transcontinental railroad another good idea that never happened.  In the East, the Civil War was co-opting most eligible workers; in the West, men preferred looking for gold to building railroads.  

But the 2 men who owned the railroads were rich and stubborn and knew a lot of influential people.  They made it happen - with immigrants: Irish in the East and Chinese in the West.  Although the Irish faced ugly discrimination in society, it was the Chinese, not being of European background, who faced discrimination not only in society but also on the job.

And to sum it all up:

There was a great deal more I either didn't see or decided not to include here - a self-guided auto tour, for instance; information about the competition between the 2 railroad companies; Congress's inability to decide where the 2 lines should meet.  This was a complicated project with consequences as vast as the territory it crossed.

The dogs and I walked around the area a couple of times, and we all ate lunch in the parking lot, and then we set out again, this time for Salt Lake City.

Northrup Grumman has a large facility out near the historic site.  And the state has wildlife management areas not far away - I'm guessing for birds, since I saw a lot of marshes and duckies.  And that management apparently includes hunting, because I also saw "public shooting grounds" in those areas.

Salt Lake City

Another time I'd like to park somewhere and walk around a bit - especially in Temple Square, as it's called.  But today was a busy weekday and cars and people were everywhere.  I couldn't even find an angle to take a photo of the state capitol, so I'm relying on internet photos to show what I saw.

First, I did see the State Capitol.

Utah State Capitol

Built in 1906, this is called a Neoclassical revival Corinthian style building.  To me it was huge and impressive.  I've learned I was seeing it at its renovated best, because from 2004 until 2008 it underwent a major re-do.  The state added 2 new buildings to the complex, restored many public areas to their original appearance and, most unusually, the building was given the structure and equipment to survive an earthquake of 7.3 magnitude.  

The Utah Geological Survey did a study in 2016 that determined the region along the west side of the Wasatch Mountains ("the Wasatch Front") where the major population areas are had a 93% chance of one or more earthquakes of magnitude 5 or larger within the next 50 years.  So the renovation committee was ahead of its time.

Although the legislature's not in session, this is a busy building with lots of traffic around it, and I couldn't even find a legal (or safe) place to pull over near the front of the building.

Only a few blocks away is Temple Square, which is actually a rectangle and is surrounded by a wall that looks like it's at least 6' tall.  Although there was a wide opening on each of the 4 sides, it was still a gray and somewhat forbidding wall.  I know the Mormons were badly persecuted in other places they lived, but this wall really disturbed me.  I guess I should have taken a picture of it, but at the time it seemed weird to take a picture of a big gray wall.  The photos I took off the internet show the buildings from their inside-the-wall perspective.

The Mormon Tabernacle

This building was completed in 1875, and the 132'-wide open space inside was a record for North America at the time.  It holds up to 8,000 people and its shape creates rare acoustical qualities.

It sits at the west end of Temple Square and I could just see it through the opening in the wall.  It looks completely not like I'd have expected the home of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir to look, being not remotely ethereal but instead much more solid and down-to-earth to my eyes.  But I saw plenty of pictures online before I came so I knew that's what I was looking at.

Now, the Mormon Temple does look ethereal, according to its internet photos.

Mormon Temple

This building took 40 years to build and was completed in 1893.  But I'm very sorry to say that this isn't even remotely what I saw.  It's apparently undergoing serious renovations because there was scaffolding all over the building and all of those lovely spires were vanished.  All I saw was scaffolding and the denuded towers.  I'm sure it'll be lovely when they're done and I should come back to see it then, but I was here now and I had to miss it.  

But I wouldn't be allowed to see inside it anyway - the church regards the temple as sacred and only church members are allowed inside.  I understand and respect the being sacred idea, but when I think of how inclusive all other Christian denominations are about visitors, this policy strikes me as odd.  But, it's their church and their rules.

Mormon Assembly Hall

Since I couldn't get my elaborate-building fix from the temple, I'm glad this building was there.  It sits in the southwest corner of Temple Square and I could see only the part above the wall - but I thought it was really pretty.  It was built 1877-1882 in the Gothic style using mostly granite left over from building the temple.  It's been used for both religious meetings and artistic performances.

I had to drive around Temple Square (actually 2 blocks long running east to west) several times to try to see as much as I could inside the wall, all the while dodging traffic and pedestrians.  

Salt Lake City has just under 200,000 residents, which is a nice-sized city but not unduly large, by Texas standards.  But it is not only the seat of state government but also the hub around which an entire world-wide religion revolves, so I should have been more prepared for the number of people than I was.

From the sublime . . . On my way to tonight's campground which was only a couple of miles away, I stopped at a state liquor store almost across the street.  My main reason was to get rid of my recyclable glass, because I'd learned online that the county accepts glass at designated areas around town and just happened to find this one.  While I was using their parking area, I decided to see what state liquor stores looked like these days.

I still remember vividly my only other encounter with a Utah State liquor store.  It was in 1977 and 44 years hasn't dulled my memory of it.  My boyfriend and I were traveling through Utah on our way to Alaska; I can't remember now whether we were in Provo or Ogden - but I doubt if there was a difference.  It was his birthday and he wanted a bottle of wine to go with the steak we'd bought; we'd seen no liquor stores and asked at the grocery store where one was; no one knew - we finally had to ask the manager - and were seriously wondering where on Earth we'd gotten to that no one even knew where a liquor store was.  We found the store, walked inside and found a bare white concrete-block room with a counter across it; the employees at the counter asked what we wanted, intending to retrieve the item from the storeroom behind them.  There were no items on display, and we had no ability to wander around and read labels on wine bottles - or even look at a list to know what they had in their storeroom.  It was not anything I've ever experienced, before or since.

But I understand Utah has a lower percentage of LDS members now than 40 years ago.  Statewide it's just under 63%, although some rural areas still have around 85% LDS membership.  But Utah (thanks to church teachings) has the highest birth rate in the country, which logically results in more young people, a group that is increasingly thinking for itself.  An illustration of that is the rapidly growing LGBT community around Salt Lake City.  Non-LDS members are moving into Utah for its climate and job opportunities.  It all changes the character of a place. 

As I saw in the liquor store.  It looked like an ordinary liquor store - slightly understocked for a major city but still ordinary.  Shelves of various hard liquors, racks of a variety of wines - all right out there in public view.  I can't tell you how surprised I was.  So I bought a bottle of scotch and a bottle of wine.  Since I could.

And because of weird traffic control measures, I had to go 9 blocks out of the way to get across the street to my campground.  It was huge, which makes sense being right inside the limits of a major city, and it was all paved and very well organized.  Except that the day before they'd had a fire in the laundry room (some idiot decided a large comforter could of course be washed and dried in ordinary machines), and the smoke damage shut down one of the 2 bathrooms - the one closest to me.  Well, it happens.