Earlier this year, the City of Covington, Kentucky, announced that a long-derelict industrial site would be making a comeback. The city, along with the Northern Kentucky Port Authority and Kenton County, announced plans for a former C&O Railroad roundhouse that had been used for more than half a century as a paper bag manufacturing plant. Hidden beneath the industrial patina are more than 150 years of industrial history.

First used in the mid-19th century as a railroad repair facility and offices, the site became a production facility for one of the nation’s biggest shopping bag manufacturers. It also became the setting for prolonged labor disputes before ending up an abandoned relic filled with stories and toxic substances accumulated throughout its history.

The Railroad Years

In the 1850s, Covington became the northern terminus for the Covington and Lexington Railroad. Ninety-nine miles of track connected Lexington to Covington by the time the route was completed in 1854.

Passengers and freight not remaining in the city crossed the Ohio River into Cincinnati — originally by ferry and after 1867, via John Roebling’s suspension bridge and later railroad bridges.

The history of American railroads is one of frequent name changes, mergers, business failures, and leases for tracks, facilities and rolling stock — the cars used to transport people, livestock, commodities and finished products.

In 1871, the Covington and Lexington Railroad’s name was changed to the Kentucky Central Railroad. By the turn of the 20th century, the old railroad had been absorbed by big trunkline railroads, the Louisville & Nashville and the Chesapeake & Ohio (C&O) railroads. When the railroad industry collapsed in the 1960s, the Chesapeake & Ohio’s freight division became part of the CSX Corporation (now known as CSX Transportation).

There aren’t many surviving histories of Covington’s railroad facilities. The earliest depiction of repair shops and a roundhouse is a Covington atlas published in 1883. It shows a roundhouse at the corner of 13^th and Washington streets, a machine shop and two repair shops.

“The round-house, which is a fine building, can house 30 locomotives,” wrote D.J. Kenny in a Cincinnati guidebook published in 1875.

The roundhouse was one of three key railroad facilities in Covington. A passenger station had been built on the north side of Pike Street, about 1,000 feet north of the roundhouse. And, a sizable stockyards facility located a few blocks south was where meat animals and horses were kept, watered, and fed before being shipped outside of the region or upon their arrival to Covington and Cincinnati.

In 1904, the C&O built a brick four-story office building at the complex. A tornado in 1915 seriously damaged the property. The office building and roundhouse were repaired and rebuilt.

The entire complex remained dedicated to servicing the railroad until 1934. That’s when the C&O leased 1.1 acres to the Triangle Paper Bag Manufacturing Company. The area leased included a 1.5-story brick machine shop fronting on Madison Avenue. It granted the paper bag company the rights to use the property for “industrial, manufacturing, wholesaling, distributing, and storage purposes” for $600 a year for the first five years and then $1,200 annually until 1959.

Covington Was a Major Paper Bag Manufacturing Center

“I’m Jewish, he came from Eastern Europe,” said Charles Shor. He’s the grandson of Icheal “I.L” Shor and the last owner of the former roundhouse and bag plant.

The Shors came to the United States in the 1890s and settled first in Keystone, West Virginia. There, I.L. Shor owned a saloon and lots of real estate, according to census records and historical newspapers.

By 1919, the family was living in Cincinnati. “He was kind of an entrepreneur,” Charles Shor said. “We had a dry goods store and he, I think initially, had a deli or something for people to eat.”

In 1921, Shor’s grandfather founded the I.L. Shor Coal Company in Kentucky.

Getting into the paper bag business was a natural step for a retailer looking to cut costs. Charles Shor never got to ask how his family made the jump from dry goods to paper bag manufacturing.

The company rapidly became a profitable customer for the C&O. Hundreds of railroad cars brought paper from Southern mills to the bag company’s plant. Charles Shor said that the railroad gave his grandfather a good deal for the 1934 lease because of the volume of business the bag company did with the transportation company.

The “Kentucky Post” reported in October 1934 that the company was building a $10,000 addition to the building it leased from the railroad. “The entire plant is being moved from across the river to Covington,” the paper wrote. “It will be housed in the old Chesapeake & Ohio R.R. workshop.”

After completing the move, in 1935 the Triangle Paper Bag Manufacturing Company reorganized as a Kentucky corporation.

Over the next 15 years, the company continued to expand. In 1940, the C&O retired its roundhouse tracks and leased the roundhouse to the Triangle company. It grew to more than 500 employees and became one of the nation’s leading paper bag manufacturers.

Labor Troubles and Technological Change

As a union plant, there were several prolonged strikes, including one in 1941 when 250 employees walked out of the Triangle company after the company denied their requests for wage increases. The strike lasted 24 days and the workers won small increases in pay for new and experienced workers, newspapers reported.

I.L Shor died in 1949 and his son, S. David Shor, succeeded him. In 1953, the younger Shor, a former World War II veteran and Charles Shor’s father, split from Triangle founder Jacobs. S. David Shor and another Triangle executive, John Lustgarten, founded the Duro Paper Bag Manufacturing Company.

The Duro company leased a building from the Southern Railway company and hired 25 people to operate the new company. “Mr. Shor plans to manufacture grocery and various other types of paper bags for sale within a radius of 300 miles of Cincinnati,” the “Cincinnati Enquirer” reported in 1953.

By then, the extended Shor family had become prominent members of Covington’s business community. In 1913, Samuel “S.E.” Greenberg went to work as a salesman for furniture store owner August Steinkamp. By 1918, Greenberg had his own furniture store, The Modern Furniture Company. For a decade, he rented a former auto parts store at 540 Madison Ave. before buying a lot on the opposite side of the street and constructing his own building in 1929: the Greenberg Building.

Greenberg’s daughter Sylvia grew up in Covington and she married Charlie Shor’s father, David.

Duro briefly competed with the Triangle company, which in 1959 was bought by one of its suppliers, the Arkansas-based Crossett Company.  The Georgia Pacific Company bought Crossett in 1962 and made Triangle one of its subsidiaries.

Another strike, in 1963, added to Triangle’s troubles. The company was a major Covington employer. Workforce cuts and work stoppages significantly reduced the city’s payroll tax revenues in 1964, according to the Kentucky Post.

Crossett (and Georgia Pacific) sold the Covington plant to the New York-based Equitable Paper Bag Company. “The Covington plant doesn’t fit in with our program for the future,” Georgia Pacific told the Kentucky Post in 1963.

Labor disputes continued and another strike in 1964 shut down the plant for 19 days. The following year, the Shor family returned to Covington when Duro acquired the former Triangle assets, including the lease with the railroad.

Duro kept its Ludlow facility and its acquisition of Triangle added a Boone County plant to the company’s growing portfolio.

Over the next 20 years, Duro maintained its position as a leading producer of bags for the nation’s largest retailers and growing fast-food restaurant chains. Duro struggled to adapt as the retail sector shifted to cheaper plastic bags made in China.

A catastrophic fire in 1977 destroyed Duro’s Ludlow plant. Investigators determined that the fire, which happened the same night as the catastrophic Beverly Hills Supper Club fire, had been intentionally set. It broke out during another strike by plant workers.

Arsonists also targeted the Covington plant and it sustained less damage than the one in Ludlow. Duro didn’t rebuild the Ludlow manufacturing, but it did keep its corporate offices there. Manufacturing shifted solely to Covington and Boone County.

By the 1980s, cheap plastic bags made in China rapidly captured the market that Duro once dominated. Duro had produced bags for some of the nation’s biggest retailers, including Kroger supermarkets, Walmart, and McDonalds.

The company struggled to pay its bills and workers. It became a specialty bag manufacturer and almost went out of business.

“When my father died in 1987, we had a fairly significant loan with First National Bank of Cincinnati,” Charles Shor recalled. “We were losing money every month.”

Charles Shor laid off a third of the workforce, secured new financing and reorganized the company by changing production methods. By then, production had ceased at the Covington plant.

The influx of cash and prolonged negotiations with CSX resulted in Duro buying the Covington property for $675,000. The transaction included all of the railroad property — more than 20 parcels and three alleys — consolidated since the 1850s.

In 2001, the Duro company transferred the property to a real estate subsidiary, Duro Covington Holdings, LLC. Duro continued to use the property for logistics until 2014 when a South Carolina company bought Duro. It has been vacant since then.

Does the Historic Building Have a Future?

When plans for the former industrial site surfaced, community leaders pledged to honor its significant history. “Part of the next steps with this project is to figure out the highest and best use of the property,” Covington city manager Sharmilli Reddy said after a January 2026 press conference.

One of the city’s first steps after the deal closes is starting the process to have the property nominated to the National Register of Historic Places. A National Register listing would bring additional funds to the city for redevelopment through historic preservation tax credits.

Complicating those plans, however, are the Port Authority’s checkered history with regard to historic preservation and toxic wastes.

In 2023, then-Covington Mayor Joseph Meyer blasted the Port Authority cavalier approach to creating architecture that is compatible with its setting and compliance with historic preservation laws. “The Port Authority has said in a definitive way that they will simply not agree to commit to follow the city’s zoning, our neighborhood development code, our historic preservation code, our design standards or our infrastructure rules,” Meyer said in a Covington Board of Commissioners meeting.

As for toxic waste at the site, Charles Shor, through CS Madison LLC — the entity he formed to manage the property after Duro’s sale — executed an environmental covenant in 2016. According to the document filed in Kenton County land records, “fueling or maintenance fluids” had been released or disposed of onsite. The covenant, which prohibits use of the property for residential purposes and details mitigation steps to protect public health, “runs with the land and is perpetual” unless modified and approved by state authorities. None of the media reporting about future development at the site mentioned the toxic substances and use restrictions.

In November 2025, Shor’s LLC filed a release eliminating all of the restrictions filed in 2016. According to the 2025 release, the Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet never approved the original covenants. Furthermore, the 2025 release doesn’t explain how the toxic substances listed in 2016 were mitigated/remediated. “There are no active or effective environmental covenants encumbering the Property ….,” the instrument reads.

Inquiring minds want to know: what happened to the toxic nasties?

© 2026 D.S. Rotenstein