ANCHORAGE (AP) – The golden spike that was used to complete the Alaska Railroad over a century ago will be on permanent display in Alaska for the first time after entities combined to win an action for the 14-karat artefact last Friday.
The Anchorage Museum and the city of Nenana, with financial help from private donors and the Alaska Railroad, won the Christie’s auction for the spike in New York with a bid of USD201,600, more than four times the USD50,000 top-line estimate for the historical artefact. The price includes a premium of 26 per cent for the auction company.
“We are thrilled to partner with Nenana to share this piece of history with the public,” said Anchorage Museum Director and CEO Julie Decker. “The Golden Spike is a great piece of storytelling about place and people.”
The plan is for the two cities to alternate displaying the spike.
“I think it’s a neat story of an urban and a rural community both along the rail belt coming together for a worthy cause. I look forward to working together and tying our communities together once again with this same Golden Spike,” Nenana Mayor Joshua Verhagen said in a statement.
Work on the nine-year railroad construction project began in 1914, linking the Pacific Ocean port city of Seward on the south-central coast to Fairbanks, 756 kilometres away. It was a government infrastructure project intended to bring coal and other minerals easily out of interior Alaska.
The project’s principal engineer was United States (US) Army Colonel Frederick Mears, who was transferred to Seattle four months before completion. The city of Anchorage thanked him for his work by presenting him the golden spike.
He sent it back from Seattle for the ceremony featuring President Warren G Harding.
On July 15, 1923, near Nenana, Harding lightly tapped the 14-centimetre spike twice, and then replaced it with a regular spike and drove it into the final coupling. Shortly after, the spike was returned to Mears in Seattle and Harding headed back to Washington but died on August 2, 1923.
