LUDLOW STOREHOUSE HISTORY

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The surviving historic structure in the Ludlow rail yards is one of Meehan's brick buildings, dating from the late 1880s or early 1890s. This building apparently functioned as the railyard "Offices & Stores," meaning that  parts manufactured in the yards and elsewhere were stored there, available for use in the repair and construction of railway engines and cars (somewhat like the "parts department" of contemporary auto dealer ships). The north end of the building held offices and it is possible that Meehan had his own headquarters  there. 

The Ludlow Offices & Stores building is a fine piece of Victorian industrial architecture. Its masonry outer  walls admit light through multiple, round-arched clerestory windows that originally illuminated the interiors  above long runs of wall-mounted shelves for holding railway parts. 

While the outer walls are of brick and stone construction, the floors and roof structure are of wood, supported along the building's central axis by wooden posts that sprout umbrella-like brackets. These heavy wooden  structural elements would probably have performed better in a fire than exposed iron.

The building is 30 feet wide by 120 feet long, parallel to the north-south direction of the tracks. The long east façade was two stories high and opened to the tracks through arched openings in its exposed, stone  "basement." (The earth has since been banked up on the east to nearly conceal this originally exposed basement). On the west, the building opens at its upper level under a Victorian canopy supported on wooden,  spindle-turned brackets (this canopy was originally continuous; two sections of it now remain). 

James Meehan's manufacturing and building activities went beyond the Ludlow yards. In 1889, he helped  establish the Ross-Meehan Foundry complex in Chattanooga, Tennessee where, in 1893, he built a facility for  manufacturing a railway brake shoe that he had invented and patented; it made him and Eleanor wealthy.  

Some of the Ross-Meehan Foundry structures survive and are among Chattanooga's oldest buildings. They  have been recently rehabilitated for use as a sports facility and a brewery. Meehan's business ventures went  further afield: he owned a large foundry in Mexico City. Meehan surely shipped metal products north by rail  from both his Chattanooga and Mexico foundries to his shop headquarters in Ludlow. 

Sometime after 1893,  Meehan built a series of six elegant Victorian townhouses on Butler Street in Ludlow (Nos. 12-22), likely to  house railway-related workers. (The Ludlow Historic Society has recently purchased one of the "Meehan  Row" houses, No. 20, and plans to restore it.) 

The surviving Ludlow "Offices & Stores" building, with its multiple, round-arched windows, might be called  "Industrial Romanesque"--a repetitious, functional interpretation of the powerful Romanesque Revival buildings designed by late 19th-century Boston architect H. H. Richardson, inspired by the round-arched European  Romanesque buildings of the early Middle Ages. 

Richardson's Romanesque buildings (which included the  now-lost Cincinnati Chamber of Commerce building of 1885-89) were picturesque in their massing, and po etic in their materials. The modular and repetitious character of the surviving Ludlow railyard building is a  more "rationalized" Romanesque that recalls buildings by Chicago architect Solon S. Beman (1853-1914),  who worked for railway magnate and industrialist George Pullman. Beman designed the Pullman factory and the adjacent company workers' town of Pullman, Illinois. 

He also designed Grand Central Station in Chicago  and the "Ivorydale" factory-town complex for Procter and Gamble in Cincinnati (1884-89). Beman was a major industrial architect of the Victorian Midwest in the 1880s-90s, working especially in railway-related contexts. 

However, while extensive Pullman repair shops existed in the Ludlow railyards, and while the surviving  Ludlow railway building resembles Beman's designs, the building does not seem to have been directly con nected with the Ludlow Pullman works. With Beman in Cincinnati and possibly involved with the Ludlow  Pullman works, it is possible that James Meehan knew him. However, Beman's architecture also represented  a widespread industrial vernacular, or "railroad Romanesque" creatively adapted by those involved with designing utilitarian railway structures. 

While James Meehan may have known prominent railway-related architects like Beman, it seems more likely  that the designer of his new structures for the Ludlow railyards, including the surviving "Offices & Stores"  building, was one of the engineers, architects, or draftsmen employed by the railroad itself. A possible candidate is engineer-architect Louis Gustave Frederic Bouscaren (1840-1904). In 1850, Bouscaren's French descended family emigrated from the island of Guadeloupe in the Caribbean to Grant County, Kentucky. 

A talented pupil, Bouscaren was admitted in 1854 to the Lycée St. Louis in Paris, France. He then entered  the prestigious Ecole Centrale des Arts and Manufactures in Paris, where he trained as an engineer for three  years. Returning to Northern Kentucky after the American Civil War, Bouscaren worked as a draftsman in the  office of prominent Cincinnati Victorian architect Samuel Hannaford. In 1873, the Cincinnati Southern Railway hired Bouscaren to assist in building its road to the south.  In 1876, he became the Cincinnati Southern's  principal engineer and in 1881, chief engineer for the Cincinnati Southern's leasee, the CNO & TP Railway.  Bouscaren is credited with designing the original Cincinnati Southern Railway bridge across the Ohio River at  Ludlow (completed, 1877).