A Golden Moment for L.A.

It was the first rail link between Los Angeles and the rest of the world.

Seven years after the East and West Coasts were joined at Promontory, Utah, thousands of spectators and laborers gathered at the community of Lang in the Santa Clarita Valley to watch Southern Pacific Railroad President Charles Crocker hammer a gold spike into a railway tie, officially connecting Los Angeles and San Francisco.

“The Lang line was our first communication with the north,” said Darrell Brewer, president of the Southern California chapter of the Railroad and Locomotive Historical Society.

The joining at Lang connected Los Angeles with the rest of the world because the city had only limited train service to the south and was mainly accessible by horse and ship, Brewer said. The railway completed at Lang eventually put Los Angeles in direct contact with centers of commerce in Chicago and New York.

But today, Lang is nothing more than a name on some maps. And the once busy Lang Station is a half-buried pile of timber beside the Santa Clara River in Canyon Country. The station was bulldozed by Southern Pacific in 1971, and all that marks the spot is a stone monument partly hidden by bushes.

“It’s the biggest secret in this valley,” said Anne Kaulbach, a member of the Santa Clarita Valley Historical Society. Until she joined the society a few years ago, she had never heard of Lang--and she has lived in the valley since 1964.

At its Heritage Square museum in Newhall, the historical society has a scale model of the Lang Station and a few dishes, nails and old tools that society members scavenged a few years ago from the station’s wreckage. Gold-plated copies of the famous golden spike can be bought in the society’s gift shop. Still, Lang has never gotten much attention.

The neglect of Lang is unfortunate because it was the site of many memorable events, said Jerry Reynolds, a past president of the society and author of several books on valley history. There was, for example, the marauding grizzly bear that terrorized ranches there.

“It ate up seven men and 100 head of cattle,” Reynolds said.

Lang is remembered mostly for founding the Sulphur Springs School District, the second oldest in Los Angeles County, with fellow pioneer John Mitchell in 1872. A year earlier, Lang shot and killed the “Monarch of the Mountains,” the giant grizzly, along the river bank.

The bear supposedly weighed 2,350 pounds, but Reynolds is skeptical. “I think John might have exaggerated a bit,” he said.