The Union Pacific Museum and Archives (review)

Most corporations only acknowledge their history when it can help them sell more products. Some even seek to weaken their ties to the past by giving themselves trendy new names, usually featuring an "X" or a "One." Very few maintain their own museums, and those that do—breweries, for example—often make them subsidiaries of the marketing department.

The Union Pacific Railroad has chosen a different route. Its name is intertwined with the history of the United States. What textbook does not devote at least a paragraph to the transcontinental railroad and the meeting of east and west at Promontory Summit, Utah, on 10 May 1869? The Union Pacific maintains not one but two full-size steam locomotives from the 1940s in operating condition, and regularly runs them for trips and excursions. Since 1921 it has kept a small museum open to the public in its Omaha headquarters. When the building was expanded in the mid-1990s the railroad moved some items to the Durham Western Heritage Museum, located in Omaha's former Union Station, but most were placed in storage. Now a new museum in Council Bluffs, Iowa, provides ample space for the display and interpretation of the collection.

The Council Bluffs museum is unlike any other railroad museum that this reviewer has seen. For one thing, it does not occupy a historic railroad structure, surrounded by rusting artifacts. In fact, there are no full-size locomotives or railcars either in or around the museum.¹ The museum is housed in the former Carnegie Library, a two-story, red-brick, Beaux Arts building (fig. 1) constructed in 1905 and owned by the city. Despite its location downtown, ample parking is available. The building has undergone a $3.5 million restoration and now provides more than 20,000 square feet of exhibit space. It is fully climate controlled and disabled accessible.

Figure 1.

Exterior of the Union Pacific Museum and Archives, in Council Bluffs, Iowa. (Author's photo.)

Council Bluffs, a city of about eighty thousand across the Missouri River from Omaha, Nebraska, the historic and current headquarters of the Union Pacific, occupies an important place in railroad history itself: it was the official starting point for the Union Pacific when that railroad was chartered in 1862.² It was also a major rail gateway, with no fewer than seven large railroads serving the community as late as the 1970s. The museum collection is the property of the Union Pacific, and the railroad is solely responsible for the content and presentation of the exhibits and artifacts. Hadley Exhibits of Buffalo, New York, did the exhibit design. Except for the museum's director, Beth Lindquist, and curator, Keely Rennie, the staff are volunteers from the Friends of the Union Pacific Museum foundation.

The new entrance is below ground level in what was the basement, and opens onto an information desk and small gift shop. Staff offices and archival space are also located on this level. Upon ascending the stairs and entering the main hall, a large photograph of a contemporary Union Pacific train dwarfed by spectacular western scenery greets visitors. A bench from an old passenger station partially blocks the path to the right, and a full-size stuffed bison, "Eugene the Buffalo," beckons visitors to the left. Proceeding in that direction, a section titled "Before the Railroad" presents a brief view of the mythic west. Here photos of Native Americans and related artifacts are on display. This is the last mention of Native Americans in the exhibits, a perhaps unintentional commentary on the effect of the coming of the railroad on their culture and way of life.

The next room chronicles the birth of the Union Pacific. One display details the development of the telegraph and its expansion across the continent. Surveying comes next, and an interactive exhibit invites visitors to pretend they are surveying the way west by looking through a transit at a man holding a pole on a distant hill. A tent used by a survey crew—the "Advance Guard of Civilization"—and other accoutrements...