STILLWATER – In 1926, when he was 20 years old, Herbert E. Sargent bought his first truck – a used one – for the whopping sum of $75. It was an inauspicious start for what would become one of the state’s largest and best-known construction companies.

Sargent hauled gravel that first summer, then pulpwood and logs in the winter. Business was so good that the next year he bought another used truck for $100 and hired his first employee. By 1930, it became clear that if he was going to take advantage of the state’s burgeoning highway system, he had to be able to move earth. So, Sargent borrowed $1,500 from his parents and made a down payment on a gasoline-powered shovel, a piece of equipment that recently had replaced steam-driven machines.

Slowly but steadily the company grew, and Sargent’s name became synonymous with the Maine Turnpike and Interstate 95 as well as with airport runways.

“Sometimes, I wonder how a guy like me could put it all together,” mused the 95-year-old Sargent from his office Monday. He was self-effacing as he pondered his company’s success in this, its 75th year. “I’m just a kind of average guy, not too bright … I didn’t sit back and say ‘Now here’s our five-year plan.’ I just went with the flow.”

That “flow” was road building through the 1920s and ’30s, runway construction for the many air bases in the state during World War II, and construction of the turnpike and interstate during the ’50s and ’60s. As the company entered the 1970s and moved into the 1980s, Sargent began branching out into environmental projects such as building and capping landfills, constructing alternative energy plants, retrofitting paper mills, and building wastewater treatment plants.

By the mid-1970s, the elder Sargent had turned the day-to-day operation of the company over to his son James and son-in-law Ralph Leonard. They shepherded the firm through its transition from solely an earth-moving operation to both earth-moving and construction. Construction projects now account for half of Sargent’s business.

In 1988, however, another family-owned construction firm, Ravel, based in France, bought H.E. Sargent Inc. The company kept its name, its founder kept his office – although he no longer owned any part of the firm – and John Simpson, a second-generation employee, took over the reins as Maine’s economy plunged into its worst recession in decades.

Simpson, 56, was accustomed to difficult beginnings. He worked in the field from 1965 to 1971 while in high school and college. After earning his degree in accounting, Simpson was to have learned the financial side of the company under the comptroller. The day before Sargent’s future CEO was to begin work, his new boss suffered a fatal heart attack. Simpson took over for him and got on-the-job training. He faced greater obstacles when he took over the helm of the company in 1989.

“We went through some difficult times,” said Simpson recently of his first year as CEO. “We had to re-evaluate our strengths and try to evaluate the markets that we thought were going to grow and basically set up a structure that has evolved into what we have currently.

“We still continue to be an earthwork company, we do environmental construction, site work, some highways and some of the same type of work that we used to do,” he said. “But, we also felt that to provide opportunities for our people that we had to look into other markets, so we identified building construction and industrial construction as some areas in which we felt we had some strengths.”

Over the next five years, other changes, over which Simpson had no control, had a major impact on the firm. In 1991, the Ravel family sold out to two French corporations, which were bought by the German industrial giant Bilfinger & Berger Bauaktiengesellschaft. It was the transfer of control of Sargent from Ravel to Fru-Con, a huge engineering and construction firm also owned by B&BB with headquarters outside of St. Louis, that proved to be a fruitful partnership. In addition to its Stillwater office, Sargent now has offices in Rochester, N.H., and Ashland, Va.

Simpson said H.E. Sargent has nearly tripled the dollar amount of its projects in the past five years. In 1996, the company did $50 million in business, he said. Projections for 2001 are $140 million, with about half of that coming from building construction rather than earthmoving work.

“Yet, many people on the street in this area, because they remember seeing those huge pieces of equipment out there belonging to Sargent, still see us as an earthwork company,” he said. “For example, we’ve been working at paper mills in Maine and New Hampshire for the last five years. One of the biggest hurdles getting into the mills up here was trying to convince people we weren’t still just a highway company.

“We were a well-respected, premiere highway company. That reputation we gained over the years is a significant asset, but it also is a double-edged sword because of what we’ve evolved into. It’s been a hard legacy to overcome.”

Once Sargent develops a relationship, whether with the state of Maine or a private firm, it rarely ends with the first project. It was the company’s work for MBNA beginning in the mid-1990s that led to a project Simpson called “one of our crowning achievements.”

In June 2000, the CEO got a call from MBNA management about “a challenging project.” Simpson had 30 minutes to figure out whether Sargent could build a 23,000-square-foot temporary home for the Lincolnville Central School, while air quality issues in the original school building were solved. The catch, according to Simpson, was that it had to be completed in 54 days so pupils could start classes on Nov. 5, 2000.

“It is one of the greatest achievements our people have accomplished,” said Simpson. “in part, because it was a good, worthy, noble cause. However, we worked along with a lot of local contractors around the clock, used a lot of novel, new approaches to construction and it was a real partnership among the design firm, the school district, MBNA and us. We just all worked together and got it done.”

Simpson stressed that successful completion of the project was due in large part to the number of good people who have been with the company for many years and their strong Maine work ethic. For instance, among the estimated 550 people Sargent employed in 2001 was Walter Parady, 82, who has been with Sargent his entire adult life, for almost 60 years. Although semiretired Parady still works as a project superintendent during the summer months.

The affection and loyalty the employees seem to have for the company date back to when Herbert Sargent was developing the business. His was the first construction firm in the state to offer health care benefits and profit sharing to full-time employees. Sargent, too, credits the company’s longevity to its employees.

At least nine of the company’s 50 key personnel have been with the firm more than 30 years. That experience shows in Sargent’s exemplary safety record. In 2000, Sargent recorded only seven lost workday cases and eight restricted workday cases out of the 863,704 hours employees worked that year.

And whether it is the $3.5 million addition at Bangor High School, which was completed this fall, or the $9.5 million Augusta Waste Water Treatment Plant built in Winthrop in 1993, or the $76 million Maine State Prison still under construction in Warren, the same hard work and honesty are poured into every project.

As Sargent’s CEO now, Simpson knows that personnel will be the one of the greatest challenges his company and many others will face in the next decade. The baby boomers produced about 78 million people for the U.S. work force, he said. Generation X is going to be in the range of 44 million. Generation Y, whose members will be in the work force between 2010 and 2012, will be near 80 million again.

For a while, “we’re going to have a shortage of qualified workers,” Simpson said. “In the construction industry, we’re going to have to look to more Spanish-speaking people, but also we’re going to have to rely on more female employees in nontraditional roles like project engineers, project managers and operations managers. Around 10 percent of our work force are female now.”

Simpson also sees opportunities, especially as population growth in Southern states continues. Sargent’s experience at building water treatment plants, constructing housing, and building service sector structures such as malls and Wal-Marts puts the firm in an excellent position to continue to expand. He added that despite the downturn in the state economy, the recent passage of bond issues should help the construction industry.

Meanwhile, Herbert Sargent will continue to watch from a distance the progress of the company he founded so long ago. Although his eyesight is weak and he’s a bit hard of hearing, Sargent walks several miles each day near his homes in Stillwater and Daytona Beach, Fla. He continues to drop in at the office, next door to the house in Stillwater he’s lived in for almost 75 years, to pick up his mail. Simpson briefs him on projects and, once in a while, he still visits a work site.

Under the company’s red and gold logo are the words, “A History of Promises Kept.” More than anything else, that explains why H.E. Sargent Inc., continues to grow years after a 20-year-old Stillwater man bought a used truck for $75.