A. A. Hart Stereographs of the Central Pacific Railroad

This collection contains 372 stereographic photographs (including some variants and duplicates) by photographer A. A. Hart that document the construction of the western half of first transcontinental railroad by the Central Pacific Railroad between 1864 and 1869. The collection includes all but seven of the original series, numbered from 1 to 364 by Hart (lacking 193, 323, 333, 358, 359, 362, and 364).

Hart served as the Central Pacific's first official photographer, and his images chronicle the advancement of the railroad over 742 miles from Newcastle, California (in 1864), through the Sierra Nevada Mountains into Nevada and on to Utah, where he captured the ceremonial meeting of the two railroads at Promontory Point on May 10, 1869. The majority of the photographs are views of mountains, lakes, rivers, and forested areas (some with stumps from clear-cutting in the foreground), often with railroad tracks running through the center of the images. In addition, there are also images of locomotives, Chinese and other workers, equipment, bridges, tunnels, frontier and mining towns, construction camps, as well as some images of Native Americans, including Paiute and Shoshone Indians.

The stereographs in the collection include a variety of imprints on the card versos. The stereographs primarily contain Hart's own Sacramento imprint with series titles including:

Interspersed in the collection are stereographs published without credit to Hart by Frank Durgan and Carleton E. Watkins. Three cards contain the imprint "Sierra Nevada Mountains, Photographed and Published by Frank Durgan" (numbers 17, 26, and 40), and approximately forty crediting Watkins variously as "C.E. Watkins," "Watkins' Pacific Railroad," and "Watkins' New Series."

Item titles transcribed from stereographs.