Year Inducted: 1990
Blount, Incorporated, was founded in 1946 by brothers Winton and Houston Blount, under the name Blount Brothers Construction Company. The company was originally located in Union Springs, Alabama, and was briefly based in Tuskegee, but in 1950 was relocated to Montgomery, where it remains today.
Since its incorporation, the company has expanded to include manufacturing divisions with worldwide operations, including Oregon Cutting Systems, Omark Material Handling, and Sporting Equipment. Oregon Cutting Systems dominates its markets, having a 70 percent market share of world-wide chain saw sales.
Blount has constructed many projects within Alabama, ranging from its first $1 million contract for the First Avenue viaduct in Birmingham, to the grassroots paper mill built for Union Camp in Prattville. Other projects include the Space Guidance Center, constructed for IBM in Huntsville; Auburn University’s Physical Sciences Center; and the Alabama Shakespeare Festival theater in Montgomery. This state-ofthe-art facility is a significant piece of engineering, in addition to being the home of a renowned repertory program. Blount has also carried out noted engineering feats around the nation; for example, the Louisiana Superdome and the award-winning PPG world headquarters in Pittsburgh.
The company is known widely for tackling technologically complex, one-of-akind projects such as the propulsion wind tunnel and propulsion test cell at the U.S. Air Force’s Arnold Engineering Development Center in Tullahoma, Tennessee; the S-1C rocket test stand in Nicholson, Mississippi; NASA’s Space Propulsion Facility in Sandusky, Ohio; a cryogenic test chamber at the Arnold Engineering Development Center in Tennessee; a transuranium processing plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee; and an engineering and research nuclear reactor facility for the Georgia Institute of Technology. As builder of many facilities at Cape Canaveral, Blount has played a major role in perhaps the greatest engineering achievement of all time-sending people to the moon.
Blount has received numerous awards, including the 1988 Contractor of the Year Award from the Florida Chapter of the American Public Works Association, a tribute to renovation work completed at Bayfront Center in St. Petersburg, Florida.
The firm also contributes to the future of engineering through its support of higher education, sponsoring an active cooperative education program that allows students to gain real-world experience to supplement their college course work. The company also sponsors a minority scholarship program, enabling many deserving, disadvantaged young people to attend college.
By applying the highest standards in the performance of its construction activity, Blount, Incorporated, has forced equally high standards to be applied in the engineering of the projects it performs.
