Among the songs that Ludlow contributed to the national literature were “Song to Old Union” (which became, and still is, Union College’s alma mater), and the “Union Terrace Song.” Fifty years later, according to Andrew Van Vranken’s Union University: Its History, Influence, Characteristics and Equipment (1907), those were still the two most popular campus songs.

Ludlow may be alluding to his “Union Terrace Song” when he writes about a song that would “ring through the free air of a balmy summer evening from a row of sitters on a terrace or a green, who snatch fragrant puffs of old Virginia between staves.” That song begins:

Ye Union boys whose pipes are lit,
Come forth in merry throng,
Upon the terrace let us sit and cheer
our hearts with song.