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Remember When, Chattanooga? The historic Union Depot delivered passengers to the Read House

Photo by Hugh J. Moore Jr. via ChattanoogaHistory.com. / This photo of the old Union Depot, with the Read House in the background, was taken in the early 1970s before the train property was leveled to make way for office buildings on Ninth Street (now M.L. King Boulevard).
Photo by Hugh J. Moore Jr. via ChattanoogaHistory.com. / This photo of the old Union Depot, with the Read House in the background, was taken in the early 1970s before the train property was leveled to make way for office buildings on Ninth Street (now M.L. King Boulevard). Photo by Hugh J. Moore Jr. via ChattanoogaHistory.com. / This photo of the old Union Depot, with the Read House in the background, was taken in the early 1970s before the train property was leveled to make way for office buildings on Ninth Street (now M.L. King Boulevard).

By Mark Kennedy 3 min read

For more than a century, Chattanooga’s railroad history was exemplified by the L&N Railroad’s Union Depot, a historic 19th century building that contained a train car shed.

Located on Ninth Street (now M.L. King Boulevard), Union Depot was demolished in the early 1970s to make way for the Krystal (now UBS) and Tallan Financial Center office buildings that occupy the property today.

This photo, with the Union Depot in the foreground, was taken by Chattanooga attorney Hugh J. Moore Jr., who captured the image shortly before the building was torn down.

“There was some controversy regarding its demolition, because of its history,” Moore said in an email. “The Civil War engine ‘The General’ had been under the shed, just behind the brick terminal structure, until the railroad returned it to the state of Georgia in the ’60s.”

The General was a locomotive stolen by Union spies in Kennesaw, Georgia, in 1862, in an episode that came to be known as the Great Locomotive Chase. The train was abandoned near Ringgold, Georgia, and the Union men were eventually captured by Confederate forces.