At Terrace, archaeology fills in the Chinese community behind a railroad ghost town

Terrace was a railroad town on the original transcontinental line north of the Great Salt Lake, established as early as 1869. It had a roundhouse, a turntable, machine shops, two hotels, a large wooden depot and, according to the 1870 census, the third-largest Chinatown in Utah. ^[1]

Little of it stands now. In 2020 and 2021, the Bureau of Land Management and the Utah State Historic Preservation Office, working with the Chinese Railroad Workers Descendants Association, excavated part of the town. An archaeologist on the project, in a video transcribed in a University of Utah teaching guide, calls the house they uncovered the first fully excavated Chinese home on the transcontinental railroad. ^[2][3]

A town that kept trains running

Terrace sat roughly midway between Elko, Nev., and Ogden, and the Central Pacific needed somewhere in western Utah to repair engines and equipment. A Bureau of Land Management history lists a 16-stall roundhouse, a machine shop, coal sheds, water tanks and an eight-track switchyard. ^[2][4]

Water was scarce. In the guide's video transcript, an archaeologist on the project says the railroad built a 13-mile pipeline from springs in the mountains to the west, for the locomotives and for residents. A BLM report describes a communal building called the Athenium, with bath houses and a reading room. ^[2][4]

The Utah Department of Cultural & Community Engagement notes that the railroad landscape is ancestral land of the Shoshone people, among other tribes. ^[5]

Chinese residents worked for the railroad and also ran their own businesses. A study by archaeologists Michael Polk, Christopher Merritt and Kenneth Cannon quotes a historical account naming Hong Lee, who kept a store; Ching Moon, a grocer; Wong Tz Chong, a tailor; Ah Lei, who grew vegetables; and Wah Hing and Wa Hop, who ran laundries. ^[1]

The National Park Service says the Central Pacific, with few exceptions, did not record individual Chinese workers' names in its surviving records. Workers were organized into groups of up to 30 men, each with a leader who received and distributed their wages. ^[6]

Hard to count

Published population figures for Terrace vary by year and by boundary. The BLM's 2021 book Rails East to Ogden reports that the 1900 census of Terrace Precinct listed no ethnic Chinese residents. It also cites a newspaper account of a late-1903 count by a federal Chinese inspector, A.W. Paine, that found 30 Chinese residents in Terrace. ^[7]

The authors read that gap as a sign that railroad laborers were still living in Terrace but were missed by the census. The two counts were three years apart, so they do not give a precise undercount. ^[7]

A Park Service overview cites an 1880 census figure of 54 Chinese residents, some working for the railroad and others as grocers, launderers and tailors, and a March 1902 newspaper article reporting that Chinese residents had a store and a place of worship and sent their children to school. That article was written by an outsider, not by the residents. ^[8]

Federal law weighed on these communities. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 barred Chinese laborers from immigrating for 10 years and barred courts from granting citizenship to Chinese residents, according to the National Archives. ^[9]

What the dig found

The excavated house was small. In a video transcribed in the University of Utah guide, an archaeologist on the project describes intact floorboards, vertical wooden back walls and a door on the downhill side, and estimates that two to four men may have lived there. Their names are not known. ^[2]

Finds included a glazed rice bowl, Chinese coins, fragments of an inkstone and food remains such as peanut shells, coconut shells, Chinese olive pits and melon seeds, according to the guide. The archaeologist says the inkstone suggests the resident was likely literate and may have written letters home; no such letters have been found. ^[2]

Polk, Merritt and Cannon found that about 80% of the Chinese ceramics recorded at Terrace were higher-cost tableware patterns, a much larger share than at nearby section stations. They suggest the distribution may help tell apart the homes of laborers and those of merchants or foremen. That is an interpretation, not a measure of any household's income. ^[1]

Before the excavation was filled back in, members of the descendants group led a ceremony honoring the workers, the guide says. Backfilling protects what remains for future study. ^[2]

How the town faded

The decline came in stages. According to Rails East to Ogden, Terrace lost its railroad shops in 1893, the engineers' union moved its division headquarters to Ogden in 1897, and dispatchers followed in 1899. A fire on June 5, 1903, destroyed the main business row. ^[7]

The Lucin Cutoff across the Great Salt Lake opened in 1904, taking main-line traffic off the old route. The original grade saw only occasional use after that, and its rails were removed in 1942. ^[4][5]

Visiting

The site lies along the BLM's Transcontinental Railroad Backcountry Byway, west of Golden Spike National Historical Park. The BLM reminds visitors that federal law protects the artifacts there and asks them not to move, take or destroy anything. ^[3]