Site of L.A.’s 1st Rail Link to World Just Name on a Map

It was the first rail link between Los Angeles and the rest of the world.

Seven years after the East and West coasts were joined at Promontory, Utah, thousands of spectators and laborers gathered at the community of Lang in the Santa Clarita Valley to watch Southern Pacific Railroad President Charles Crocker hammer a nine-ounce spike of pure gold into a railway tie, officially connecting Los Angeles and San Francisco.

“The Lang line was our first communication with the north,” said Darrell Brewer, president of the Southern California chapter of the Railroad and Locomotive Historical Society.

The joining at Lang connected Los Angeles with the rest of the world because the city had only limited train service to the south and was mainly accessible by horse and ship, Brewer said. The railway completed at Lang eventually put Los Angeles in direct contact with Chicago and New York, thus allowing Los Angeles to grow, he said.

But today, Lang is nothing more than a name on some maps. And the once busy Lang Station is a half-buried pile of timber beside the Santa Clara River in Canyon Country. The station was bulldozed by the Southern Pacific in 1971, and all that marks the spot is a stone monument partly hidden by bushes.

“It’s the biggest secret in this valley,” said Anne Kaulbach, a member of the Santa Clarita Valley Historical Society. Until she joined the society a few years ago, she had never heard of Lang--and she’s lived in the valley since 1964.

Despite Lang’s importance, other historic sites and events in the Santa Clarita Valley overshadow it, maybe because they are more exotic, notorious or gruesome.

Most valley residents know about the Oak of the Golden Dream, where gold was discovered in 1842, or Vasquez Rocks, the hide-out of bandit Tiburcio Vasquez. Many have also visited the site of the St. Francis Dam, which collapsed in 1928, flooding the valley and killing 450 people.

At its Heritage Square museum in Newhall, the historical society has a scale model of the Lang Station and a few dishes, nails and old tools that society members scavenged a few years ago from the station’s wreckage. Gold-plated copies of the famous golden spike can be bought in the society’s gift shop. Still, Lang has never gotten much attention.

The neglect of Lang is unfortunate because it was the site of many memorable events, said Jerry Reynolds, a past president of the society and author of several books on valley history. There was, for example, the marauding grizzly bear that terrorized ranches there.

“It ate up seven men and 100 head of cattle,” Reynolds said.

Lang was founded by John Lang, a cattle rancher originally from New York who once owned about 30 acres where UCLA now stands, Reynolds said. Lang later bought 1,200 acres just east of the Santa Clara River.

Lang is remembered mostly for founding the Sulphur Springs School District, the second oldest in Los Angeles County, with fellow pioneer John Mitchell in 1872. A year earlier, Lang shot and killed the “Monarch of the Mountains,” the giant grizzly, along the river bank.

The bear supposedly weighed 2,350 pounds, but Reynolds is skeptical. “I think John might have exaggerated a bit,” he said.

Another grizzly attacked two men about 1877 near what is now a trailer park upstream of the Lang stone monument, Reynolds said.

“This big bear leaped out of the bush,” he said.

The bear lunged at one man and, according to accounts of the time, “just tore his whole face and the top of his head off,” Reynolds said. The beast then seized the other man and chewed off an arm.

Somehow, the injured men shoved a rifle against the bear’s chest and pulled the trigger, killing it with a bullet to the heart. The men lived, Reynolds said, and “they managed to walk a mile and a half back to Lang Station.”

Work on the railway that would pass through Lang actually began in 1875, when thousands of Chinese stonemasons began boring and blasting a tunnel through the San Gabriel Mountains to connect the San Fernando and Santa Clarita valleys. The tunnel, which is still used today, passes through more than a mile of solid rock.

By midsummer, 1876, shortly after the nation celebrated its centennial, the tunnel was complete and workers began laying the last tracks that would meet in Lang, 43 miles north of Los Angeles. On Sept. 5, 1876, the mayors of San Francisco and Los Angeles joined 1,000 spectators who cheered the 4,000 workers who raced to finish the line.

A reporter from the Los Angeles Star newspaper described the scene: “Swarms of Chinese and scores of teams and drivers formed a working display such as is seldom seen. . . . The spot selected for the ceremony was on a broad and beautiful plain surrounded by undulating hills on the one side and the rugged peaks and deep gorges of the San Fernando mountains on the other.”

The railroad brought a brass band, a golden spike and a silver hammer to celebrate the event. They forgot, however, to bring a camera.

Crocker told the crowd: “This wedding of Los Angeles and San Francisco is not a ceremony consecrated by the bands of wedlock but by the bands of steel.” He then added, quite correctly: “Gentlemen, I am no public speaker, but I can drive a spike.” He drove it home with six blows.

John Lang built a hotel and spa next to the train station, which served as a shipping point for cattle, ore and grain, Reynolds said. The spa, fed by water from a nearby spring, was closed in 1938 after a landslide triggered by hard rains smothered the spring in mud.

Lang Station, rebuilt after it burned to the ground in 1888, was used until 1971, Reynolds said. Finally declared obsolete, it was “just pushed off its foundations” by a bulldozer, he said.

On a recent afternoon, Reynolds poked through some of the debris that is still visible. “That’s the outside wall,” he said, holding up a board once painted a dull mustard yellow.

The site held no reminders of the picturesque scene described by the newspaper reporter in 1876. A car tire, an automobile hood, chunks of concrete and an occasional beer bottle littered the ground. Trucks hauling earth at a nearby sand and gravel business rumbled in the background.

The last big crowds gathered at Lang in 1926 and 1976 to celebrate the 50th and 100th anniversaries of the rail line. The golden spike and the silver hammer are kept at the California Historical Society in San Francisco.

The stone monument erected in 1976 bears two plaques, one describing the spiking, the other praising the often forgotten work of the Chinese immigrants whose muscle built the railway. The plaque, erected by the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California, is inscribed 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.”