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SALT LAKE CITY — Jill Love was among the throng that formed outside of the Utah Capitol on a breezy Monday afternoon, eagerly waiting for a 43-foot monument of the golden spike to arrive.
Moments later, a semitruck coming off of I-15 meandered around a bend and parked the gold leaf-wrapped aluminum spike in front of the crowd, as children blew into wooden toy train whistles and train-themed songs blared out of speakers set up nearby. Those in attendance quickly whipped out their phones to document the moment as they stepped up to inspect every tiny detail included in the piece.
"It's just so spectacular," said Love, executive director of the Utah Department of Cultural & Community Engagement, as she stood a few feet from the spike. "It's just beautiful. The gold is amazing — I don't know, it's just everything we hoped it would be."
The 8,000-pound replica of the famous golden spike — commissioned a few years ago by the Golden Spike Foundation to help tell the story of the transcontinental railroad — was unveiled earlier this month during a ceremony in Kentucky, where artist Douwe Blumberg spent the past three years constructing it.
It's been on the road since then, giving residents of cities and towns along the original transcontinental railroad line an opportunity to view the monument. Robyn Kremer, president of the Golden Spike Foundation, said those communities embraced the spike as warmly as Utahns on Monday.
"The enthusiasm for this has been pretty remarkable," she said. "There were times where I was really surprised at the welcome, the enthusiasm and how this story resonates so thoroughly today. ... It's been wildly successful."
The monument, she adds, will be displayed through Tuesday for schoolchildren touring the state Capitol before it's put into storage for the winter. It'll go on a similar tour to communities by the railroad line west of Utah in the spring before it's installed in its permanent home, an 8-acre plot of land near the Forest Street exit by I-15 in Brigham City by June 2024.
What's on the monument?
Blumberg, who followed his creation on tour, admits that he didn't know that many details about the transcontinental railroad when he first saw a call for artists that the Golden Spike Foundation had issued about three years ago. However, he envisioned a design that covered a 20-foot golden spike with faces that ultimately won over the foundation.
At some point in the design process, foundation members asked him to double the size of the monument, which completely changed what Blumberg had in mind. By then, he had become more enthralled with many of the facets of the transcontinental railroad's history and the size change offered him a bigger canvas to tell these stories in a bolder way.
"When the surface area increased extensionally, it didn't feel right just to have faces. I thought, 'I can use this space to tell more stories,'" he told KSL.com. "It opened things up."
While the golden spike stands out because of its sheer size, it's the details engraved into that captivate anyone who views it.
The final design tells vastly different transcontinental railroad stories on four sides in an effort to tell the whole story of the project. The diverse laborers of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads take up two sides, including nods to the Chinese railroad workers, Irish immigrants, Civil War veterans and many others who came together to build the line.
The innovators, inventors and new technology that arose at the time of the railroad take up another side, while the impact the line and Western migration had on Native American communities and the country's future takes up the other.
There were so many interesting plot points to choose from that Blumberg says he couldn't fit everything into the design, but he tried to get as many details in it as possible.
"It's like trying to make a smoothie with too many ingredients," he said. "You can't put it all there."
How to see the spike in the future
The spike will be mostly out of sight after Tuesday, but when it's permanently installed in Brigham City next year, it will be placed in a way that the Union Pacific tale is viewed coming in from the east, while the Central Pacific story moves in from the west, as the two lines came into Utah in 1869.
The plan is to include signage that will help tell as much of a complete story about the railroad as possible to help remind visitors about the project's importance in history.
Love said she hopes people will come to visit the spike given its relevance to Utah history. From there, she hopes that they take a short drive northwest to Golden Spike National Historic Park at the site where the two lines met to learn even more about it.
Blumberg's ultimate goal, however, is that people will think about the transcontinental railroad's "messy" history in a different way, and possibly relate it to current events in a form simple enough that people of all ages can enjoy it.
"I'm hoping — because it is so multifaceted — that people (take) away all kinds of messages," he said. "I think it recognizes how diverse this effort was and how that reflects what we're seeing today, and how that can be a powerful, powerful thing for good."
