After Promontory: 150 Years of Transcontinental Railroading

— The exhibit will run from June to September 30 in the Head House —

This traveling exhibit has been featured all over the country and highlights the work of highly acclaimed photographers such as William Henry Jackson, Timothy H. O’Sullivan and Carleton E. Watkins. There will be more than 60 photos on display—showcasing the significance and lasting impact of the transcontinental railroads throughout the American West—, along with a bonus section featuring the history of Union Depot and railroading in Minnesota.

After Promontory takes a wide view, considering the events at Promontory to be the start of a larger phenomenon, an entire era of transcontinental railroad construction that stretched for nearly fifty years.

ON MAY 10, 1869, TWO RAILROADS—built with haste, hope, and aspiration—joined in a lonely desert of northern Utah, at a place called Promontory. On that day, dignitaries from both companies—the Central Pacific, which had built from California, and the Union Pacific, which had built from the east—gave speeches and installed ceremonial last spikes.

Promontory was an inflection point in the history of the American West—as well as the country as a whole—a moment that both symbolically and literally gave birth to a region of measurement, colonization, and extraction, to what historian Donald Worster has called “the engineered West.” After Promontory explores how photographic artists have received and represented that West both in the era of the transcontinentals, and in the region they have left us to inhabit.

To learn more visit railphoto-art.org/exhibits/after-promontory/