Absecon 59: /* L&N Employment */
[[File:RIchard Montfort LandN Mag Mar 1931.jpg|thumb|Richard Montfort, first chief engineer of the Louisville & Nashville Railroad.]]
'''Richard Montfort''' ([[County Carlow]], [[Ireland]], 4 March 1854 – 7 February 1931, [[Atlantic City]], [[New Jersey]], [[USA]]), was an [[Irish-American]] architect and engineer. He served as the first chief engineer of the [[Louisville & Nashville Railroad]] from 1887 to 1905, and in this capacity designed several of the L&N’s most important structures, including [[Union Station (Nashville)|Union Station]] in [[Nashville]], [[Tennessee]] (1900), and the L&N station in [[Knoxville]] (1904).
==Early Life==
Montfort was born in the 1850s in County Carlow, in southeastern Ireland. He attended the Kingstown School in what is now [[Dún Laoghaire]], [[County Dublin]], a suburb of the Irish capital, and then moved on to the Royal College of Science in [[Dublin]], where he received his training as an engineer and graduated in 1876.
After graduation he immigrated to [[Louisville]], [[Kentucky]], where he found work with the Louisville Bridge and Iron Company, rising successively over the next four years from draftsman, to inspector, and finally assistant engineer.
==L&N Employment==
[[File:Map of the Louisville & Nashville Railroad (1913).jpg|right|thumb|250px|The Louisville & Nashville Railroad's network, 1913. Montfort was in charge of maintaining and upgrading all constructions over this geographic area.]] In 1880 Montfort accepted the position of bridge engineer with the Louisville & Nashville Railroad, (L&N), which, from its principal axis between its two titular rapidly-developing cities, was quickly becoming the preeminent railroad in the mid-South. During the [[Gilded Age]], the L&N expanded and consolidated a vast network throughout Kentucky, Tennessee, and Alabama, with sections of track in North Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana, Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana, often using predatory practices to squeeze or buy out smaller regional railroads, as was the norm in the industry before the Federal government began to implement serious regulation. Many through services from the midwestern cities of Chicago, Indianapolis, and St. Louis bound for Atlanta, Birmingham, the Carolinas, and Florida, including some of the famous named trains of American railroad lore, ran over its network and called at the L&N’s prominent stations.
Within three years Montfort had become resident engineer of the entire L&N system, in charge of the roadway, bridges, and building departments. In 1887, at the tender age of 33, in recognition of his expertise, he was awarded the newly-created title of chief engineer, in which capacity he served for the next seventeen years. In addition to being a highly capable engineer, a vital asset to the L&N in an era of rapid expansion, Montfort was a highly knowledgeable architect. He was responsible for the design of the new Union Station in Nashville, which, along with the other great terminal Union Station in Louisville, served as the twin architectural representations of the company’s strength at the turn of the century. He became one of the key persons in the L&N’s growth over the last quarter of the nineteenth century into one of the country’s most robust corporations.
[[File:WTN PeepHoles 156.JPG|thumb|right|250px|Union Station, Nashville, Tennessee, Montfort's most famous building.]] Nashville Union Station, opened on 9 October 1900, in the year of the last great [[Exposition Universelle (1900)|Paris World’s Fair]] of the nineteenth century, is Montfort’s greatest monument, even though it no longer serves passenger traffic. Montfort designed the station in a very late (and somewhat out-of-fashion) [[Richardsonian Romanesque|Richardsonian-Romanesque]] style, with an exterior envelope of rusticated, irregular, almost unfinished stone and a high picturesque steep-gabled roof punctuated by dormers and crowned at the front entrance by a tall clock tower, itself capped by a statue of [[Mercury]], the [[Romans|Roman]] god of commerce. The interior features a great main concourse and waiting room, encircled by gallery levels onto which offices of the L&N’s higher-level employees opened. The station's traffic was reduced to one daily train, the ''[[Floridian]]'' between [[Chicago]] and [[St. Petersburg, Florida]] upon [[Amtrak]]'s takeover of the American passenger rail network on 1 May 1971, then was entirely abandoned with the termination of the service in 1979. It sat empty until 1986, when it was redeveloped into the luxurious Union Station Hotel, whose lobby occupies the spacious main concourse with guest rooms in the levels above. Developers struggled to find a use for Montfort's train shed, claimed to be the largest in the world at one point, and it was demolished in 2000 after being damaged by a fire in 1996.
Four years after the completion of the Nashville station, Montfort was employed to design another new L&N station in downtown Knoxville, Tennessee, the largest city in the eastern third of the state and a gateway to [[Appalachia]]. He designed a shallow-roofed Italian-Renaissance depot whose headhouse served as the terminus for the L&N rail lines entering the city, meaning the trains had to decouple their locomotives and hook up to a different one at their opposite ends to enter and leave the station. After the L&N abandoned all service to Knoxville in the 1960s, the vast rail yards behind the station were then redeveloped into what would become [[World’s Fair Park]], the site of the [[1982 World’s Fair]]. The station itself, which served as a restaurant during the event, has recently been converted into a municipal math-and-science public magnet school.
Montfort must have been exhausted from his duties. On 1 January 1905 he stepped down from his post at his own request and was named consulting engineer, effectively retiring at the age of fifty-one. From that time on, his duties chiefly consisted of representing the railroad at meetings of the American Railway Engineering Association and sitting on the L&N’s own Rail Committee.
==Personal Life and Death==
Montfort married Miss Henri Barret (1861–1900) not long after his arrival in Louisville, with whom he had one son, Barret Montfort, who later became vice-president of the Chemical National Bank & Trust Company of New York.
Montfort was a member of several prominent organizations, including the Fourth Presbyterian Church in Louisville, the [[American Society of Civil Engineers]], American Railway Engineering Association, and the Engineers’ and Architects’ and Pendennis Clubs of Louisville.
Early in 1930 Montfort injured his head in a fall at age 75 and his health generally declined afterwards. He died in Atlantic City in early 1931 having travelled there in an attempt to recover his health.
Montfort’s will and biographical notes, as well as some of his family’s archives are held in the Barret family papers in the Special Collections of the [[Western Kentucky University]] libraries in [[Bowling Green]].
==See also==
*[[Louisville & Nashville Railroad]]
==Bibliography==
* “Former Chief Engineer Dies,” ''L&N Magazine'' 7, no. 1 (March 1931): 23.
'''Richard Montfort''' ([[County Carlow]], [[Ireland]], 4 March 1854 – 7 February 1931, [[Atlantic City]], [[New Jersey]], [[USA]]), was an [[Irish-American]] architect and engineer. He served as the first chief engineer of the [[Louisville & Nashville Railroad]] from 1887 to 1905, and in this capacity designed several of the L&N’s most important structures, including [[Union Station (Nashville)|Union Station]] in [[Nashville]], [[Tennessee]] (1900), and the L&N station in [[Knoxville]] (1904).
==Early Life==
Montfort was born in the 1850s in County Carlow, in southeastern Ireland. He attended the Kingstown School in what is now [[Dún Laoghaire]], [[County Dublin]], a suburb of the Irish capital, and then moved on to the Royal College of Science in [[Dublin]], where he received his training as an engineer and graduated in 1876.
After graduation he immigrated to [[Louisville]], [[Kentucky]], where he found work with the Louisville Bridge and Iron Company, rising successively over the next four years from draftsman, to inspector, and finally assistant engineer.
==L&N Employment==
[[File:Map of the Louisville & Nashville Railroad (1913).jpg|right|thumb|250px|The Louisville & Nashville Railroad's network, 1913. Montfort was in charge of maintaining and upgrading all constructions over this geographic area.]] In 1880 Montfort accepted the position of bridge engineer with the Louisville & Nashville Railroad, (L&N), which, from its principal axis between its two titular rapidly-developing cities, was quickly becoming the preeminent railroad in the mid-South. During the [[Gilded Age]], the L&N expanded and consolidated a vast network throughout Kentucky, Tennessee, and Alabama, with sections of track in North Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana, Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana, often using predatory practices to squeeze or buy out smaller regional railroads, as was the norm in the industry before the Federal government began to implement serious regulation. Many through services from the midwestern cities of Chicago, Indianapolis, and St. Louis bound for Atlanta, Birmingham, the Carolinas, and Florida, including some of the famous named trains of American railroad lore, ran over its network and called at the L&N’s prominent stations.
Within three years Montfort had become resident engineer of the entire L&N system, in charge of the roadway, bridges, and building departments. In 1887, at the tender age of 33, in recognition of his expertise, he was awarded the newly-created title of chief engineer, in which capacity he served for the next seventeen years. In addition to being a highly capable engineer, a vital asset to the L&N in an era of rapid expansion, Montfort was a highly knowledgeable architect. He was responsible for the design of the new Union Station in Nashville, which, along with the other great terminal Union Station in Louisville, served as the twin architectural representations of the company’s strength at the turn of the century. He became one of the key persons in the L&N’s growth over the last quarter of the nineteenth century into one of the country’s most robust corporations.
[[File:WTN PeepHoles 156.JPG|thumb|right|250px|Union Station, Nashville, Tennessee, Montfort's most famous building.]] Nashville Union Station, opened on 9 October 1900, in the year of the last great [[Exposition Universelle (1900)|Paris World’s Fair]] of the nineteenth century, is Montfort’s greatest monument, even though it no longer serves passenger traffic. Montfort designed the station in a very late (and somewhat out-of-fashion) [[Richardsonian Romanesque|Richardsonian-Romanesque]] style, with an exterior envelope of rusticated, irregular, almost unfinished stone and a high picturesque steep-gabled roof punctuated by dormers and crowned at the front entrance by a tall clock tower, itself capped by a statue of [[Mercury]], the [[Romans|Roman]] god of commerce. The interior features a great main concourse and waiting room, encircled by gallery levels onto which offices of the L&N’s higher-level employees opened. The station's traffic was reduced to one daily train, the ''[[Floridian]]'' between [[Chicago]] and [[St. Petersburg, Florida]] upon [[Amtrak]]'s takeover of the American passenger rail network on 1 May 1971, then was entirely abandoned with the termination of the service in 1979. It sat empty until 1986, when it was redeveloped into the luxurious Union Station Hotel, whose lobby occupies the spacious main concourse with guest rooms in the levels above. Developers struggled to find a use for Montfort's train shed, claimed to be the largest in the world at one point, and it was demolished in 2000 after being damaged by a fire in 1996.
Four years after the completion of the Nashville station, Montfort was employed to design another new L&N station in downtown Knoxville, Tennessee, the largest city in the eastern third of the state and a gateway to [[Appalachia]]. He designed a shallow-roofed Italian-Renaissance depot whose headhouse served as the terminus for the L&N rail lines entering the city, meaning the trains had to decouple their locomotives and hook up to a different one at their opposite ends to enter and leave the station. After the L&N abandoned all service to Knoxville in the 1960s, the vast rail yards behind the station were then redeveloped into what would become [[World’s Fair Park]], the site of the [[1982 World’s Fair]]. The station itself, which served as a restaurant during the event, has recently been converted into a municipal math-and-science public magnet school.
Montfort must have been exhausted from his duties. On 1 January 1905 he stepped down from his post at his own request and was named consulting engineer, effectively retiring at the age of fifty-one. From that time on, his duties chiefly consisted of representing the railroad at meetings of the American Railway Engineering Association and sitting on the L&N’s own Rail Committee.
==Personal Life and Death==
Montfort married Miss Henri Barret (1861–1900) not long after his arrival in Louisville, with whom he had one son, Barret Montfort, who later became vice-president of the Chemical National Bank & Trust Company of New York.
Montfort was a member of several prominent organizations, including the Fourth Presbyterian Church in Louisville, the [[American Society of Civil Engineers]], American Railway Engineering Association, and the Engineers’ and Architects’ and Pendennis Clubs of Louisville.
Early in 1930 Montfort injured his head in a fall at age 75 and his health generally declined afterwards. He died in Atlantic City in early 1931 having travelled there in an attempt to recover his health.
Montfort’s will and biographical notes, as well as some of his family’s archives are held in the Barret family papers in the Special Collections of the [[Western Kentucky University]] libraries in [[Bowling Green]].
==See also==
*[[Louisville & Nashville Railroad]]
==Bibliography==
* “Former Chief Engineer Dies,” ''L&N Magazine'' 7, no. 1 (March 1931): 23.
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