Junction City
Near Ogden, Utah
On May tenth, eighteen sixty-nine, a ceremonial golden spike was driven into a tie at Promontory Summit, about fifty miles northwest of here, completing the first transcontinental railroad. Leland Stanford of the Central Pacific and Thomas Durant of the Union Pacific telegraphed the news to the nation. Church bells rang in Boston. Cannons fired in San Francisco. Abraham Lincoln, who had signed the Pacific Railroad Act seven years earlier, did not live to see it.
But the junction was not at Promontory for long. Promontory was remote, its water bad, its facilities crude. The Union Pacific had already reached Ogden on March eighth, sixty-nine days before the spike ceremony, and both railroads understood quickly that Ogden was the natural center of operations. Three towns competed for the junction designation: Corinne, Uintah, and Ogden. In eighteen seventy-four, Brigham Young donated land parcels to the railroads on the condition that they build their switching yards and depot in west Ogden. The railroads agreed.
The transformation was fast and permanent. Ogden had been a small Mormon farming settlement of perhaps a few hundred people. By eighteen seventy it had more than three thousand residents. By eighteen ninety it had nearly thirteen thousand, and four separate railroads ran through it: the Union Pacific, the Central Pacific, the Utah Northern, and the Utah Central. Ogden became the shipping, manufacturing, and financial capital of Utah. Not Salt Lake City, which sat fifty miles south and was served mainly by connecting lines.
They called Ogden the Junction City. Every transcontinental passenger changed trains here. Every freight shipment crossing the country passed through these yards. The city that grew around that fact, the hotels, the restaurants, the brothels, the banks, was built on the logic of the switch.
The Union Station you can see from here is not the original. It is the third building on this site, completed in nineteen twenty-four after its predecessor burned. But the logic of the place is unchanged: everything passed through Ogden because Ogden was the middle.
