Editor’s Note: This is the 484th in a series of articles recalling vanished Huntington scenes.
HUNTINGTON — For more than 30 years, Ross Concrete & Mortar Inc., located at the foot of 20th Street on the Ohio River, built much of Huntington’s infrastructure.
As J. Jay Ross, the company’s president, explained in a 1939 interview with The Herald-Dispatch, “We purchased a similar firm in 1933, changed the name and immediately undertook a major expansion.”
The company produced ready-mixed concrete and mortar and dispatched it to job sites via a fleet of more than a dozen trucks. It employed 30 to 40 men.
“We furnished 50% of the concrete for the city’s central floodwall,” Ross said, “furnished it all for the 29th Street overhead bridge, the new Ohio River road and the 1st Street underpass, one of the finest I have ever seen.”
Ross also pointed with pride to the public housing projects then under construction by the Huntington Housing Authority, the new Huntington East High School, other schools and various projects at St. Mary’s Hospital, International Nickel and the West Virginia Rail Co.
But 50% of the company’s business, Ross said, didn’t involve large construction projects but “small jobs such as house foundations, sidewalks and the like. We are interested in and prepared to furnish prompt work on any job — large or small.”
According to corporate records in the West Virginia Secretary of State’s office, Ross Concrete went out of business in 1965.
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