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." 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. The interior features a great main concourse and waiting room, encircled by gallery levels onto which offices of the L&amp;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. 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.