Harrison Construction Co. relies on Volvo Wheel Loaders from ASCENDUM for its aggregate business in Tennessee and North Carolina. The company values the reliability, ruggedness, and ease of use of Volvo loaders to efficiently move heavy materials for its construction projects, including paving jobs on iconic mountain roads.
CEG photo
Harrison Construction bought its newest Volvo L120 a few months ago for one of its concrete plants.
Any aggregates business that operates concrete plants, asphalt facilities and quarries can only be successful if it uses the best machines to move its heavy materials from one place to another.
One such firm is Harrison Construction Co., with offices in Knoxville, Tenn., and Asheville, N.C., that not only supplies and delivers construction aggregates in eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina but is itself a major paving contractor in the area.
Through its almost three dozen facilities, concrete plants and quarries scattered across the two states, Harrison helps builders create a full range of construction and development projects by supplying crushed stone, ready mix concrete and asphalt.
Founded in 1928 in Alcoa, Tenn., Harrison decades later became a division of CRH, a worldwide conglomerate and leading provider of building materials solutions.
A sister company to Harrison Construction is Harrison Aggregates, which operates all seven of its stone quarries in the mountains of southwestern North Carolina. In addition, the construction business runs a sand quarry in Monterey, near Cookeville, Tenn.
Harrison Favors Volvo Loaders Through ASCENDUM
So just what type of equipment and brand has Harrison found to be one of its most valuable tools?
The man to answer that question is Joey Walker, a 23-year veteran of the company who currently serves as Harrison's equipment manager and shop supervisor in eastern Tennessee. His company has come to rely heavily on products made by Volvo Construction Equipment (CE) and purchased from the ASCENDUM Machinery branch location in Knoxville, he said.
CEG photo
Joey Walker, a 23-year veteran of the Harrison Construction, currently serves as the company's equipment manager and shop supervisor in eastern Tennessee.
More specifically, Walker noted that Harrison has come to increasingly rely on the Volvo L120 wheel loader over the past four years.
"We just bought our newest Volvo L120 a few months ago for one of our concrete plants, and that is the fourth L120 we have bought since 2020," he said. "We have also purchased a Volvo L70 loader for another plant in Morristown, Tenn., because the people there needed a smaller loader bucket to fit into their bins."
The latest L120 loader in Harrison's fleet now works at the company's concrete facility in Lenoir City, Tenn., and joins other Volvo loaders at Harrison-owned plants in Tennessee on Topside Road in Louisville, at the Lovell Road site in Knoxville, and at a nearby construction site.
Walker said Harrison enjoys using the Volvo wheel loaders because of how they are engineered to be both dependable and rugged.
"Since we bought the first two from ASCENDUM in 2020, we have not had to have any major repairs in that time, and that is hard to find," he said. "With a lot of new machines, you can buy them and two months later start having problems.
"Volvos are also a very good fit for our concrete plants," Walker added. "They are just the right size to get under the aggregate bins and take care of everything for us. Plus, the operators like them because of how easy they are to run. Their size and reliability are the best things about our Volvos. We put about 750 hours on them each year."
He said that the operator of the last Volvo L120 that Harrison bought immediately noticed a stark difference between that machine and an older loader she had been using. The operator is now much more comfortable running the Volvo model.
ASCENDUM's Service Backs Customers
As Walker acts as both Harrison's equipment manager and shop supervisor in the Knoxville region, his combined duties include taking care of the service department's day-to-day operations where, he said, "if a piece of equipment breaks down, I either send out one of my mechanics or call one of our vendors to get them to make the repairs. I also monitor a five-year plan for the company to see what equipment we are going to need for the future and then purchase those machines."
One of those vendors that Walker contacts in Knoxville, for both sales and service, is ASCENDUM, the N.C.-based distributor of Volvo CE and other construction equipment brands.
"I mainly deal with Brandon Grant in the service department at ASCENDUM," Walker said. "He always gives us excellent care and is easy to work with. One day, I called him because we had a machine that was de-rated. He didn't have any service techs available, so he went himself to where the equipment was, diagnosed the problem, ordered the part and it came in the next day. Soon, the machine was up and running again.
"A lot of times you can call a shop and they tell you they can't get you in for two weeks, but Brandon always tells us that he can work on our machines either that day or the next to get us back and working quickly."
Spectacular Mountain Roads Among Harrison's Projects
Beyond its network of quarries and concrete plants, Harrison Construction's other work involves running its own road paving and concrete crews, Walker said, a switch from its many years working primarily in earthmoving.
One of the company's projects was a paving job on eastern Tennessee's Foothills Parkway, a scenic road similar to the Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina and Virginia's Skyline Drive that offers spectacular views of the Great Smokies Mountains at its southern end.
The Foothills Parkway has been in the works for approximately 75 years, and is likely to last another two decades, but Walker said that his company completed a major, 16-mi. portion of the route a few years ago near Walland, Tenn.
Currently, Harrison is working on repaving the formidable Tail of the Dragon, an often-challenging stretch of U.S. Highway 129 that starts in Blount County, Tenn., and crosses southeast through the Great Smokies to Robbinsville, N.C.
The roadway gets its name from the 318 sharp curves — resembling a dragon's tail — that motorists must maneuver within just 11 mi. of the two-lane route in Tennessee.
"It is a really popular road for motorcycle and sports car enthusiasts," Walker said. "We are paving from the North Carolina-Tennessee state line down to the end of it in Robbinsville."
Harrison's repaving of the Tail of the Dragon project will make it easier for tourists heading to the serpentine roadway from the Gatlinburg-Pigeon Forge area in Tennessee via the completed southern sections of the Foothills Parkway.
The construction company is currently working on Interstate 75 in Tennessee's Anderson County, an approximately 5.5-mi.-long project from Tennessee Highway 61 southeast into Knox County.
All this work can, at times, greatly increase the volume of asphalt that Harrison puts on roadbeds in a single year, Walker said.
"For instance, I know in 2022 we put down about a half-million tons of asphalt," he said. "We typically run three to five paving crews a year, based on market opportunities. In 2022, though, we had to run five crews to keep up with all the work he had."
Among other contractors in the region, though, Harrison Construction is best known for the broad category of course particulate material it produces — everything from decorative landscaping chips to base stone for foundations in roads and railroads as well as key components of composite materials such as concrete and asphalt. CEG
Eric Olson
A writer and contributing editor for CEG since 2008, Eric Olson has worked in the business for more than 40 years.
Olson grew up in the small town of Lenoir, NC in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, where he began covering sports for the local newspaper at age 18. He continued to do that for several other dailies in the area while in college at Appalachian State University. Following his graduation, he moved on to gain experience at two other publications before becoming a real estate and special features writer and editor at the Winston-Salem Journal for 10 years. Since 1999 he has worked as a corporate media liaison and freelance writer, in addition to his time at CEG.
He and his wife, Tara, have been married for 33 years and are the parents of two grown and successful daughters. His hobbies include collecting history books, watching his beloved Green Bay Packers and caring for his three dogs and one cat.
Read more from Eric Olson here.
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