![]() ![]() This purported sense of unity is a bit of whitewashing on an undertaking that, in addition to supporting the Manifest Destiny-fueled colonization of North America, also cost many thousands of ( mostly Chinese) immigrant workers their lives, but the power of the spike as a symbol of American progress clearly resonated with contemporary bidders. That sense of unity means as much today as it did when the transcontinental railroad was finished less than four years after the Civil War.” A steel railroad spike clad in gold and silver used in the ceremony marking the completion of the transcontinental railroad, May 10, 1869 “I think the spike captured the imagination of collectors, in part, because it is a potent symbol of national unity. ![]() “In the end, the value soared past our expectations,” Klarnet added. To the unknowing spectator, the approximately five-inch-long piece may look like a slightly overblown souvenir from the state train museum, but Peter Klarnet, Christie’s senior specialist of Americana, said he and his team “knew it would be the subject of intense competition among collectors.” ![]() The event, which involved four commemorative spikes in total, was one of the first events in history to be live-broadcast to an entire nation. He is a member of the non-profit Michigan Street Preservation Corporation, for whom the city recently earmarked 210,000 to renovate another Michigan Street landmark, the Nash Home, where Rev. “Hewes opted to commission instead a golden spike as his offering to commemorate the meeting of the two railroads,” Christie’s catalogue essay explains. The Underground Railroad is only one of his ambitions to improve Buffalo in general and, in particular, the hard-luck, impoverished East Side. Hewes had benefited greatly from the railroad development, capitalizing on steam shovels to fill in wetlands surrounding San Francisco, and was seeking a celebratory gesture to combat what he saw as a lack of “proper sentiment being expressed by the people of the Pacific Coast, and especially by the great mining industries of the territories through which this railroad passed.” First envisioned as a notion of “silver rails” at the connecting railway lines, the idea morphed into a golden spike. Safford, it took its cue from the first spike commissioned for the event, by David Hewes, the brother-in-law of Jane Stanford, the wife of Central Pacific Railroad Director Leland Stanford. Commissioned and presented by Arizona Territorial Governor Anson P.K. The object was one of four ceremonial spikes used to mark the “meeting of the rails” at Promontory Point, Utah, in May 1869. ![]()
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