Richard Montfort

Richard Montfort (County Carlow, Ireland, 4 March 1854 – 7 February 1931, Atlantic City, New Jersey, United States), 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 in Nashville, Tennessee (1898–1900), and the L&N station in Knoxville (1904–05). He was one of the key persons to contribute to the L&N's growth over the last quarter of the nineteenth century and first quarter of the twentieth into one of the US's most robust corporations. Early life Montfort was born in the 1850s in County Carlow, in southeastern Ireland, a highly agricultural area with virtually no industry. A Protestant in a heavily Catholic region, 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 relatively-new 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 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 upper and mid-South of the US. 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, Florida, Virginia, 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, Memphis, 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.