Brasfield & Gorrie history

Next, he joined the United States Navy’s Civil Engineering Corp., serving a three-year term before returning to Birmingham in 1960.

The company was founded in 1964 when a young Miller Gorrie used his life savings to purchase the construction assets of the Thos.

In 1967, he decided to add his name to the business’s title, renaming the company Brasfield & Gorrie, and moved it to Birmingham’s Southside, where it would remain for the next 40 years.

One of the first defining events in the company’s development occurred in 1968, when it completed its first multistory, concrete project.

Engineering News-Record listed Bras-field & Gorrie among the 400 largest contractors in the United States, an annual ranking that would include the Birmingham firm every year from 1975 into the 21st century.

In 1977, a market of tremendous importance to Brasfield & Gorrie was entered when the firm took on its first water and sewage treatment contract, a project that soon led to a slew of requests to construct other plants.

As profitability increased, the company shifted its emphasis to larger commercial, institutional, healthcare, and industrial projects, and in 1984, Brasfield & Gorrie opened full-service offices in Atlanta and Orlando.

In a 1994 leadership transition, Jim Gorrie became President of Brasfield & Gorrie, while Miller remained as Chairman and CEO.

The company’s Atlanta office was pressed to its limits early in the decade, given the herculean task of providing 50,000 yards of concrete for the construction of the Georgia Dome, the site of the 1996 Summer Olympics.

Bras-field & Gorrie was awarded arguably its most difficult project in 2002, when its Atlanta office was selected to build the more than $200 million Georgia Aquarium, the largest of its kind in the country and one of the largest in the world.

By 2004, when the company celebrated the 40th anniversary of Gorrie’s purchase of the Thomas C. Brasfield Co., Bras-field & Gorrie comprised nearly 20 divisions, a number that would increase almost annually.

A three-story, 138,000-square-foot, $55 million building, Bailey Medical was completed in late 2006, at which time Brasfield & Gorrie had $4.2 billion worth of work in progress or under contract.

With additional offices added in Raleigh, North Carolina; Nashville, Tennessee; Jacksonville, Florida; Dallas, Texas; and Columbus, Georgia; Brasfield & Gorrie has increased its profitability from less than $1 million in its first year of operation to close to $2 billion in 2010.

In 2012, the company expanded once again, opening an office in Columbus, Ga.

Brasfield & Gorrie has approximately 2,600 employees, and its 2013 revenues were $2.3 billion.