Summit Camp

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Heritage Sites at the Intersection of Landscape, Memory, and Place: Archaeology, Heritage Commemoration, and Practice" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Summit Camp was occupied by Chinese railroad workers from 1864 to 1869. It was the longest occupied camp associated with the building of the transcontinental railroad. Workers from the camp excavated a series of tunnels through the granite bedrock of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. The Sierras were the greatest hurdle for the railroad, and, without the efforts of the Chinese residents of Summit Camp, the project could not have been completed. In the 1920s, US 40 was built adjacent to the former construction camp at its scenic location in Donner Pass. With the camp’s importance to the railroad, and its accessibility to the public, it became a well-known and much visited site of historical interest. Since the 1960s, Summit Camp has been recognized as an important archaeological site; however, it was never formally elevated above the status of “potentially eligible” for the National Register of Historic Places. It took the efforts of an avocational group dedicated to the promotion of the nineteenth-century Chinese experience to spur things into action. Today a number of private parties, nonprofit organizations, and governmental agencies are jointly working toward formal recognition of Summit Camp as a significant cultural, historical, and archaeological site.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Heritage Sites at the Intersection of Landscape, Memory, and Place: Archaeology, Heritage Commemoration, and Practice   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37033.0