Contractor Herbert Sargent dies at 100

OLD TOWN – Eighty years after he started a local business that grew from its humble beginnings to become a prominent East Coast construction company, the founder of that firm has died.

Herbert E. Sargent, who started H.E. Sargent Inc. in 1926, died peacefully Sunday surrounded by his family at his home in the village of Stillwater. He turned 100 years old in February.

“You’d think he wanted to get to his 100th birthday and call it good,” his grandson, Herbert R. Sargent, said Monday.

Three weeks ago, the centenarian returned from his winter house in Daytona, Fla., to his home of 68 years on Bennoch Road, which is next to the headquarters of the company that bears his name, his grandson said.

He said his grandfather had been in relatively good physical shape for someone who had lived for a century. Nonetheless, the elder Sargent had some health conditions about which he wanted to consult with his Maine doctors.

“It was earlier than he typically would have come back,” his grandson said. “While he enjoyed Florida, Maine was his home.”

Since the time Sargent, at age 20, started the company with a used REO dump truck he bought for $75, it developed into a firm with more than 300 employees and annual sales between $80 million and $100 million. The company has participated on projects in 17 eastern states, from Maine to South Carolina, and also has a mid-Atlantic regional office in Ashland, Va.

A ceremony honoring Sargent’s life will be held at 1 p.m. Thursday, April 13, at Stillwater Federated Church on Bennoch Road.

Gov. John Baldacci released a statement Monday extending his sympathy to Sargent’s family.

“Herb E. Sargent is the definition of a Maine entrepreneur,” Baldacci said. “Beyond being a smart businessman, Herb E. was extremely generous to the Old Town-Orono community. He had a big heart.”

Valerie Osborne, director of the Old Town Public Library, said Monday that Sargent was one of her heroes.

He donated significant amounts of money to hometown organizations and events such as the library, the YMCA, the Old Town Museum, the Concert in the Park summer music series, and the Canoe Hullabaloo river festival, she said. He was the first president of the Old Town City Council when the city switched in 1946 from an alderman type of government to a city council format.

“People liked him and loved him,” Osborne said. “He was such a humble, unassuming, kind and decent person.”

In 2003, Old Town’s Herbert E. Sargent Elementary School became the Herbert E. Sargent Community Center when the school merged with others in the city, according to Chris Avila, the city’s elementary school principal. Avila, a Stillwater resident, was a longtime teacher and principal at the Herbert E. Sargent school before the new elementary school opened three years ago.

“He lived for the community. That’s what his focus was,” Avila said. “We’re going to feel a loss for many years.”

Sargent was born Feb. 22, 1906, in Alton, where his parents James and Grace Sargent lived and where his father operated a sawmill. During his youth he often helped out at the mill and also worked periodically in a blacksmith shop, on Penobscot River log drives, at a local family farm, and in the Greenville area as a registered Maine guide, according to his family.

He was president of his class at Milo High School when he graduated in 1925. Three years later, he married his high school sweetheart, Amber Warren, with whom he would have four daughters and a son.

The fall after high school, he enrolled at the University of Maine in Orono, majoring in chemical engineering. The next summer, after he purchased his first truck, he helped haul gravel for the university’s Memorial Gymnasium construction project before returning to classes that fall.

Health problems related to his chemical engineering studies, however, prompted Sargent to drop out of school early in his sophomore year. He decided to return to the trucking work he had done during the summer and stayed with that line of work for the rest of his professional life.

In its early days, H.E. Sargent Inc. specialized in moving earth, winning defense contracts to build runways during Word War II, and later building parts of the new interstate highway system in Maine, including the turnpike.

Later, the company branched out into environmental projects and building construction. Much of the company’s expansion and diversification occurred during the 1970s and 1980s, after Sargent had turned the day-to-day operations of the firm over to his son James Sargent and to his son-in-law Ralph Leonard.

In 1988 H.E. Sargent Inc. was sold to French construction company Razel. Through a series of mergers and acquisitions, H.E. Sargent became a subsidiary of Fru-Con, a firm based in suburban St. Louis and owned by German construction conglomerate Bilfinger-Berger AG.

Last year, the Sargent family reacquired ownership of the company Herbert E. had founded 79 years before. Herbert R. Sargent’s company, Sargent & Sargent of Hampden, bought H.E. Sargent Inc. from Fru-Con in July 2005 for an undisclosed sum. The combined companies now are both run out of the H.E. Sargent office on Bennoch Road.

“I think it’s a great thing,” Herbert E. Sargent said last summer about the sale when contacted by phone at his West Enfield camp. “I think a great deal of my grandson.”

His grandson on Monday returned the affection his grandfather had shown him.

“He was a great guy,” the grandson said. “They don’t come along very often. He’s going to be missed without a doubt. He’s been a great role model for all of us.”