Southern Industrial Constructors employs over 750 skilled project managers, field superintendents, craftsmen, equipment operators, estimators, engineers, administrators, and safety professionals, and has performed jobs ranging in size from $500 to $40 million. Southern Industrial is a one-stop shop for turnkey industrial construction, industrial electrical construction, electrical panel shop fabrication, specialized metal fabrication, industrial plant maintenance, and turnkey crane & rigging services. Southern Industrial performs small, medium and large mechanical and electrical projects at process and manufacturing facilities all over the Eastern half of the United States. In addition, Southern Industrial’s Rigging Division performs small day rigging jobs to entire plant relocations, often moving entire companies from one state to another, or simply moving big pieces of manufacturing equipment from one side of a plant to the other side, or just across an aisle.
After finishing his hitch as a United States Naval officer during the Korean War, Earl Johnson, Jr., returned to Raleigh, North Carolina and joined his father’s insurance company as a young insurance agent focused on insuring growing businesses in North Carolina. Johnson quickly discovered that while he could make a good living in the insurance business, it was not the right business for him.
While working his “day job” as an insurance agent, he was
constantly on the lookout for a business he could sink his
teeth into and spend his life building. In the course of
insuring various construction contractors in the Raleigh
area, Johnson realized there were no cranes available for
rental in the eastern half of North Carolina. The Research
Triangle Park was just beginning to take shape. All of North
Carolina was starting to grow rapidly during this period,
and it has been growing ever since. Earl Johnson realized he
was in the right place at the right time.
Desire to succeed
On his 31st birthday in June 1962, Johnson started Carolina Crane Corporation in Raleigh, North Carolina. He owned the business fifty-fifty with John McDowell, a large Raleigh grading contractor, and one of Johnson’s insurance customers. McDowell owned a good sized fleet of trucks that could be used by Carolina Crane to haul everything to and from jobsites, and he also had years of construction industry knowledge and contacts. Johnson had youth, energy and a desire to succeed. The partners bought their first crane in June of 1962, a brand-new Lorain Crane MC 325. Decades later, Johnson can still picture the crane and the related bank note in exact detail.
Johnson vividly recalls the Lorain MC 325’s first two jobs: “We rented it the first day we took delivery to a company erecting an asphalt plant in Wilson, North Carolina, where it remained for several weeks. While the crane was on that jobsite, another contractor saw the crane working. After our crane finished its work at the asphalt plant, and we were driving it back to Raleigh, this man drove up from behind and flagged us down about one mile down the road. He said he had seen our crane working, explained that he was building a new Ralston Purina plant a few miles away, and asked if he could rent our crane for one month. We immediately answered yes, turned the crane around, and followed him to the jobsite. The crane stayed on that jobsite for six weeks, and by the time that job finished, we had several more jobs lined up.”
Johnson continued, “We learned a few things right off the bat – there seemed to be a real need for cranes in our area of North Carolina that would support adding some more cranes, and we needed to put our name and phone number on our cranes so people could call us to rent them rather than having to run us down on the highway!”
In October 1962, Carolina Crane added a Bucyrus-Erie H-5 15-Ton Hydro-Crane. “It was a screwball crane,” remembered Johnson. “It would only swing 370 degrees, a full circle plus 10 percent, and then you had to unwind it, and swing back the other way.”
This second crane was so busy, Carolina Crane bought a third crane within three months, another Bucyrus-Erie H-5 Hydro- Crane. This purchase was quickly followed by a new 40-ton Lorain from the L.B. Smith dealership in Baltimore, Maryland. Johnson rode up to Baltimore with some friends to go to an Orioles baseball game, and on the way home, they let him out on the side of the George Washington Parkway. He walked up the hill to L.B. Smith’s yard, picked up his crane, and drove it home.
Carolina Crane picked up the next two cranes in Albany, New York, a Lorain MC-545, and in Boston, Massachusetts, Lorain MC-550. On the way back from Boston, Johnson got a little off-track driving through New York City and ended-up in Times Square with his new crane and no permit. An officer from the New York Police Department took pity on this lost Southern Boy, and escorted him out of town to the George Washington Bridge and sent him on his way south.
full-time business
By 1964, Carolina Crane had enough business for Johnson to quit selling insurance and start full-time into the crane rental business. By 1966, Carolina Crane had eight cranes ranging in size from 15 tons to 50 tons. The fleet was comprised of six hydraulic cranes, one 25-ton Northwest dragline crawler, and one 30-ton Bucyrus-Erie crawler. Carolina Crane was still the only crane company from Raleigh to the coast of North Carolina.
In 1967, Johnson bought out his original partner, and Carolina Crane joined the Specialized Carriers and Rigging Association. In 1968, Johnson took on Bob “Pero” Robinson as his new partner. They had gone to boarding school together in Virginia. While Johnson had been building Carolina Crane, Robinson had been working as a civil engineer for Nello Teer, an international grading and general contractor based out of Durham, North Carolina. After many years with Teer, Robinson left to get a law degree. Johnson asked Robinson to join him at Carolina Crane to help it grow from a crane rental business into a crane and contracting business.
One of their first contracting jobs was the grading for a new Hyperbolic Chamber Building at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, where they ran into rock. The contract had a rock clause that stated something to the effect that if a two-yard steam shovel excavator was not able to dig the soil, then it was considered “rock.”
Johnson traveled to West Virginia, rented a two-yard steam shovel, and put it on a train bound for Durham to determine if the soil was “rock.” As fortune would have it, there had not been rain for a week so the red shale in that area was hard as rock and the shovel could not dig it. All parties agreed that they had run into rock, and that Carolina Crane’s grading work would be paid at a higher “rock rate.” Carolina Crane had to start dynamiting to break up the shale, but as luck would have it, the rains came, softening the shale to the point they could dig it with the two-yard steam shovel. Regardless, the higher rock rate held, and Carolina Crane had its first big, successful construction project. Carolina Crane was on its way to bigger things.
