PROMONTORY SUMMIT, Utah Territory, May 10 — A single telegraph click changed everything. The message “DONE” flashed across the wires, triggering nationwide celebrations. The First Transcontinental Railroad was finished.
The ceremony that marked the moment centered on a single object: a 17.6-karat gold spike, known as the golden spike or the Last Spike. Leland Stanford, president of the Central Pacific Railroad, took a hammer and drove it into a pre-drilled hole in a laurelwood tie.
The spike itself was engraved with the names of the railroad’s officers and directors. Union Pacific Vice President Thomas C. Durant was there, as were representatives from both railroads.
But the spike didn’t stay in the ground for long. Almost as soon as Stanford tapped it in, workers removed the golden spike and replaced it with an ordinary iron spike.
The reason was simple: they didn’t want anyone stealing it. The golden spike was never meant to hold the rails together. It was a ceremonial object, a symbol.
The site of that ceremony is now preserved as the Golden Spike National Historical Park.
The spike’s afterlife
The original golden spike didn’t disappear. It’s housed today at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University. Stanford, after all, was the man who swung the hammer.
For a piece of gold, the spike carries an outsized historical weight. It represents the end of a project that had consumed the nation for years.
What the spike means now
The spike itself is small — 17.6 karats of gold. It was never meant to be functional. It was meant to be memorable.
And it worked. More than 150 years later, people still talk about the golden spike.
The Cantor Arts Center keeps it behind glass. The message “DONE” that went out over the telegraph wires that day was one of the first coast-to-coast instant communications in American history.
{“@context”: “https://schema.org”, “@type”: “NewsArticle”, “headline”: “Promontory Summit’s Golden Spike Ceremony Completed Transcontinental Railroad”, “description”: “PROMONTORY SUMMIT, Utah Territory, May 10 — A single telegraph click changed everything. The message “DONE” flashed across the wires, triggering nationwide celebrations. The First…”, “datePublished”: “2026-07-10T09:30:00+00:00”, “author”: {“@type”: “Person”, “name”: “Erika Johnson”}, “publisher”: {“@type”: “Organization”, “name”: “InfoPulse Today”, “url”: “https://newsfeed.infopulsetoday.com/”}}
