On the evening of April 10, 2026, 800 people filled the Cross Insurance Center in Bangor for the kind of event the construction industry rarely gets to hold: a centennial.
Employee-owners, retirees, members of the Sargent family, and business partners gathered to mark 100 years of Sargent Corporation, the heavy civil contractor headquartered in Orono. A new documentary was screened, the Maine-grown band 12/OC performed, and at the center of the room, serving as the centerpiece of the evening, sat a custom-painted bulldozer, finished by employee-owners Dustyn Davis and Ron Powers.
“When I think about Sargent reaching 100 years, my first thought is, how did they start this thing 100 years ago?” said Herb R. Sargent, the company’s board chair and the founder’s grandson. “Then right behind that is just what a privilege it is to be part of it. I feel a real connection to the people who built this company long before I was here, the people I’ve worked with through the years, and the people who aren’t even born yet who will carry it forward. That’s what makes this milestone feel so deep and so meaningful.”
The story begins in 1926 in Stillwater, Maine, with a young man named Herbert E. Sargent and a used REO dump truck.
Herb Sargent grew up in Alton, a sparsely populated farming and lumber town, one of a handful of students in a one-room schoolhouse. He once told his grandson that, standing on that school step as a boy, looking out at Passadumkeag Mountain some 20 miles away, he wondered if he would ever travel that far in his lifetime. The world was that small. The automobile had just arrived. Paved roads barely existed.
Herb Sargent could see what was coming. He had grown up around his father’s sawmill, knew how to work, and understood the opportunity when infrastructure began to be built in earnest. In 1926, he bought that used REO dump truck, with a bed that had to be tipped by hand, and hired it out for road work. Over the following decades, his company, H.E. Sargent Incorporated, helped build portions of the Maine Turnpike and key sections of Interstate 95, and expanded into airports, utilities, and landfill projects as the state built itself up.
What set H.E. Sargent apart, by nearly every account, was something harder to quantify than equipment or revenue. “A lot of successful businessmen did projects on a handshake,” said retired Business Development Manager Stephen Perry, who joined the company in 1975 and spent 46 years there. “Herb went above and beyond that. He basically felt like, regardless of whether he was going to lose money or not, he was going to do the project to the satisfaction of the customer, regardless.”
Under son Jim Sargent, who became president, and son-in-law Ralph Leonard, who became board chair, the company diversified beyond highway earthwork into utilities and environmental work. By the time Superintendent Scott Blanchard joined as a surveyor fresh out of the University of Maine in 1986, H.E. Sargent carried a particular weight. “If you had an H.E. Sargent hat on,” Blanchard said, “you were something.”
In 1988, the Sargent family sold H.E. Sargent to Razel, a large French construction firm. The company was later sold to a German company, Bilfinger Berger, and its St. Louis subsidiary, Fru-Con Construction. Decision-making moved thousands of miles away. Equipment purchases required months of approval. The culture that had been built over six decades began to pull apart.
“You lose a piece of your identity when that happens,” said Eric Ritchie, who is now Sargent’s president & CEO. “There’s an extra meaning where you can walk down the hallway and talk to the guy who owns the company, and you know that he came from a background similar to you, versus answering to a faceless entity somewhere overseas.”
In 1991, Herbert E. Sargent’s grandson, Herb R. Sargent, made a decision. He was 27 years old, a superintendent at H.E. Sargent, and unhappy with what the company had become under foreign ownership. He left the company, went home, and started a company called Sargent & Sargent out of a spare bedroom. He had no equipment, no employees, and an idea.
His new company, Sargent & Sargent’s first major job was a Walmart site in Bangor, a $3 million project he secured against longer-established competition by promising the developer plainly: “If you hire me, I’ll lay awake and worry about it and you won’t have to.” He called Kevin Gordon, a former colleague, and assembled a crew. When the project fell behind on curbing, Herb and Gordon rented a light plant and worked through the night. That became the ethos of the company. Whatever it takes.
By 2005, Sargent & Sargent had grown into a respected, lean operation, and Fru-Con was ready to sell H.E. Sargent. What followed was described within the company as a guppy swallowing a whale: a roughly 100-person contractor acquiring a firm three to four times its size. Herb R. Sargent put everything he had on the line. The deal closed on July 21, 2005.
The day after, Herb R. gathered the office staff on the front steps of the company’s Bennoch Road headquarters. The message, recalled by those in the room, was direct: the owner was back in the store. Decision-making was no longer going to St. Louis or Germany. The office existed to serve the field, not the other way around.
Herbert E. Sargent, the founder, was 99 years old and still alive to see the company return to family ownership. Herb R. visited him the morning after closing. The elder Herb did not say much, but later told his son Jim he could have gone out and danced a jig.
The two companies came together under the single name Sargent Corporation later that fall.
Eight years after the reunion, Herb R. Sargent made the decision that now defines the company as much as anything built in the field.
In 2013, he sold Sargent Corporation to its employees through an Employee Stock Ownership Plan, crediting workers’ prior years of service from the start so that ownership meant something immediately. A sale to another outside company was not on the table. The ESOP checked every box: stability in culture, a tax structure that allowed the company to reinvest, and a way for the people doing the work to share in what they built.
“That’s one of the things I value most about employee-ownership,” said Tasha Gardner, the company’s vice president of finance and CFO. “It creates continuity, shared responsibility, and a real benefit for the people who are putting in the work every day.”
The plan has grown well beyond early projections. Workers in their 20s are building retirement balances that few in their position at other construction companies can match. What began as a succession solution has become the defining structure of the company.
“I’ve never seen a business model like it,” said Ritchie. “It allows for wealth to be distributed throughout the company, not just to the owner. What Herb set up has set us up for success, and now we’re all about sustaining that going into the next century.”
Today, Sargent employs more than 650 employee-owners across New England and the Mid-Atlantic, operating in Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Virginia, and North Carolina. In late 2025, the company acquired E.L. Vining & Son, a Farmington-based contractor, deepening its Western Maine presence. The company is heading into its second century with what management has described as the largest project backlog in its history.
The April 10 celebration introduced the Herbert E. Sargent Founder’s Award, a new recognition honoring the character and example the company traces back to its founder and its Core Purpose & Values. It comes with a financial bonus and funds for the recipient to donate to a charity of their choosing.
The first recipient was Kevin Gordon, the company’s Workforce Advancement director. Gordon answered a phone call from Herb Sargent in 1992 and has spent more than thirty years helping to train the next generation of Sargent workers, building the Sargent Construction Academy, a program that now prepares employee-owners, starting on their first day on a job site, for years of field experience and career growth.
“There are not many companies that make it to 100 years, and even fewer that do more than just make it; they keep adapting and thriving,” said Ritchie. “The company has changed with the times, but it has kept the kind of people who are willing to meet challenges head-on, work together, and keep building something that lasts.”
Herb R. Sargent has written a company history, “The Hard Work Starts Today,” drawn from his grandfather’s journals and the accounts of the people who built H.E. Sargent from a single truck.
A century in, the company is still approaching it the same way.
For more information, visit sargent.us.
Find more Sargent stories with the company podcast on Spotify, Sargent: On Track Podcast.
