14212 Lang Station Rd., Canyon Country 91387 (near Soledad Canyon Rd.)
On September 5, 1876, the railroad line connecting San Francisco and Los Angeles was completed here at Lang Station.
The railroad enabled California to develop as a single economic and political unit. Completing the connection required workers to bore numerous tunnels through the solid rock of the Tehachapi Mountains. Although many ethnic groups participated in this effort, Chinese workers were especially crucial. Despite their contributions to the California economy, however, Chinese laborers endured inhumane and discriminatory conditions, including segregated camps and inferior food, as they laid tracks and dynamited mountains. Death, paralysis, amputation, and injury were common. These workers were also much maligned and targeted by a fierce anti-Chinese movement.
As the line neared completion, a contest was held to see if the workers from the north or from the south would be the first to complete the last 500 yards. The Los Angeles team won. Charles Crocker, president of the Southern Pacific Railroad, drove a gold spike into the track, surrounded by hundreds of prominent businessmen. While they celebrated the engineering prowess and massive public and private investment that made the railroad possible, the laborers were largely disregarded, except for a dehumanizing portrait by the San Francisco Chronicle that minimized their contributions. The newspaper reported: “There were nearly 4,000 people on the ground, nearly 3,000 being Chinese employees of the railroad who with their picks, shovels and bamboo hats arranged on either side of the track looked on with wondering eyes and jabbering away like so many parrots. . . . After Crocker gave the signal and the locomotives whistled . . . the air was full of dust, steel rails and iron mauls hammering in the spikes. All the tracklayers were Caucasians and the Chinese simply looked on and cheered their favorite crew.”
In 1976, the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California cosponsored Lang Station’s centennial celebration, at which it installed a plaque that reads, in English and Chinese, “On this centennial we honor over three thousand Chinese who helped build the Southern Pacific Railroad and the San Fernando Tunnel. Their labor gave California the first north-south railway, changing the state’s history.” The original golden spike is housed at the California Historical Society in San Francisco.
Images:
- Lang Station, 2009. Photo by Wendy Cheng.
- Chinese workers and their boss near Lang Station, 1876. Photographer unknown. Courtesy of Los Angeles Public Library.