Richard Montfort

Union Station, Nashville, Tennessee, Montfort's most famous building.

Ground was broken for Nashville Union Station on 1 August 1898, and it was opened on 9 October 1900, in the year of the last great Paris World's Fair of the nineteenth century. Even though it no longer serves passenger traffic, it remains the greatest monument to Montfort, as "by his force, all plans and prints were prepared."[8] Montfort designed the station in a very late (and somewhat out-of-fashion) 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 Roman god of commerce, transferred there from the commerce pavilion at the 1897 Tennessee Centennial and International Exposition. Supposedly Montfort was inspired by H.H. Richardson's last great work, the Allegheny County Courthouse in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which uses a highly similar set of façades and front clock tower.[9] 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 interior bas-reliefs on either side of its prominent mezzanine clock were affectionately and appropriately called "Miss Louisville" and "Miss Nashville," and it once featured a pool in which alligators swam.[10] Montfort spared no expense at luxury: the station building itself cost $350,000, the train shed another $200,000, and the freight terminal another $100,000—in all, the equivalent of some $19,800,000 in 2018.[11][12]

Though often threatened with demolition between the 1960s and 1980s, when it was deemed only a matter of time before the wrecking balls would get it, the station remains one of the most important architectural landmarks of the late Victorian era in Nashville, and represented the city's rapid ascent to one of the leading metropolises in the New South that industrialised in the years after the American Civil War. The day of its inauguration in 1900 was marked by a parade that featured numerous bands, society ladies, Confederate veterans and horsemen, firemen, postmen, and a grand banquet among whom August Belmont, the banker and Chairman of the L&N's Board of Directors, was a distinguished guest.[13] Union Station's importance was augmented with the addition in the 1930s of the city's main post office next door, making it also a vital link in the efficient regional distribution of mail.

After dwindling passenger service throughout the post-World War II era, Nashville Union 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.[14] 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; as a result, the station's designation as a National Historic Landmark was withdrawn in 2003.[15]

Montfort's other major railroad station, the L&N depot in Knoxville, now a magnet school for math and science.

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 tile-roofed red-brick depot in a Chateauesque/Flemish-Renaissance-revival style whose headhouse served as the stub-end 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. Its construction was desired by the L&N after the completion of the Southern Railway's grand passenger and freight complex on the north side of downtown in 1903 by its noted house architect Frank Pierce Milburn.[16] Opened on 10 April 1905, Montfort's station almost immediately became a regional landmark: James Agee described its "smouldering" stained glass and referenced it multiple times in his novel A Death in the Family, set in Knoxville in 1915.[17] 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 (appropriately, given Montfort's engineering training) into a high-performing municipal math-and-science public magnet school.[18]

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. 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.[19]

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 February 1931, having traveled there in an attempt to recover his health.[20]

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.[21]