Golden Spike Ceremony

The ceremony the register names came on March 11, 1908, at Sheridan's Point, milepost 50.5 of the new line, and it completed the Portland & Seattle Railway between Kennewick and Vancouver. Hill's Great Northern and the Northern Pacific had incorporated it in 1905 as a joint subsidiary, half each, and early in 1908 renamed it the Spokane, Portland and Seattle to stress its Spokane connection; it never ran to Seattle. The south bank had had its railway since 1882, and the panel here measures the north shore's wait for a train in those twenty-six years.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Bonneville Dam — 1.4 mi
  The first federal dam on the Columbia, where someone has counted the fish climbing its ladders every year since 1938, beside an island the Corps used as a dump for forty years.
• Multnomah Falls — 11 mi
  A 620-foot double waterfall whose 1925 stone lodge survived because firefighters kept it soaked while the forest burned around it in September 2017.
• Vista House at Crown Point — 18 mi
  A rest stop on a basalt point 733 feet above the Columbia, budgeted at $12,000, finished for about $100,000, and mocked for years as Oregon's most expensive outhouse.
• Timberline Lodge — 24 mi
  A lodge raised by hand by relief workers in 1936-38, from boulders off the mountain and iron forged from old railroad rails, and dark for an unpaid power bill less than twenty years later.

More markers nearby

• Bridge of the Gods — 1.0 mi
• Beacon Rock — 2.3 mi
• Broughton Flume — 14 mi
• River Highway — 19 mi