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Title
Hell On Wheels
Artist
Jon Burch Photography
Medium
Photograph - Digital Capture & Enhancement
Description
The Ames Monument is a large pyramid in Albany County, Wyoming, designed by Henry Hobson Richardson and dedicated to brothers Oakes Ames and Oliver Ames, Jr., Union Pacific Railroad financiers. The brothers garnered credit for connecting the nation by rail upon completion of the United States' First Transcontinental Railroad in 1869. Oakes, a U.S. representative to the United States Congress from Massachusetts, asserted near total control of its construction and Oliver became president of the Union Pacific Railroad (1866 - 1871). In 1873 investigators implicated Oakes in fraud associated with financing of the railroad. Congress subsequently censured Oakes, who resigned in 1873. He died soon thereafter.
The Ames Monument marked the highest point on the transcontinental railroad at 8,247 feet. The small town of Sherman arose at the site north of the tracks where trains stopped to change engines on their transcontinental journey. The stop provided a roundhouse with five stalls and a turntable, two section houses, and a windmill with water tank. Trains were inspected at Sherman before beginning the long descent from the Sherman Pass summit, either east towards Cheyenne or west across the 130 feet high Dale Creek Bridge to the Laramie Valley. The town's death knell came in 1918. The railroad company closed its station house and relocated the tracks about three miles south. Residents soon abandoned Sherman, leaving behind a small cemetery that is still present today.
The Ames Monument is located about 20 miles east of Laramie, Wyoming, on a wind-blown, treeless summit south of Interstate 80 at the Vedauwoo exit. The monument is a four-sided, random ashlar pyramid, 60 feet square at the base and 60 feet high, constructed of light-colored native granite. The pyramid features an interior passage, now sealed, alongside the perimeter of the structure's base.
Noted American architect H. H. Richardson designed the pyramid, which includes two 9 feet tall bas-relief portraits of the Ames brothers by sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens on the east and west sides of the pyramid's top. Saint-Gaudens chiseled the bas-reliefs from Quincy, Massachusetts, granite. The north side, which at one time faced the railroad tracks, displays one-foot-high letters grouted in the granite noting: "In Memory of Oakes Ames and Oliver Ames". On October 31, 2016, the site received National Historic Landmark status.
Hell on Wheels is a western television series about the construction of the First Transcontinental Railroad across the United States. The series chronicled the Union Pacific Railroad and its laborers, mercenaries, prostitutes, surveyors, and others who lived, worked, and died in the mobile encampment, called "Hell on Wheels", that followed the rail head west across the Great Plains.
Some digital effects were applied to this original image after the photograph was made. No electrons were harmed during the transition. Ordered images will not contain the FAA watermark.
Image copyright 2019 by Jon Burch Photography.
Uploaded
July 12th, 2019
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