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Incorporated: 1882 as Ash Grove White Lime Association
NAIC: 327310 Cement Manufacturing
SIC: 3241 Cement - Hydraulic

Ash Grove Cement Company is one of the leading cement manufacturing companies in the United States and the largest American-owned company in the field. Spread across nine states, the privately held, Overland Park, Kansas-based business operates nine cement plants with a combined annual production capacity of nearly nine million tons and also operates one lime plant in Portland, Oregon, 20 cement terminals, and aggregate quarries in Canada and the United States. Ash Grove offers a full range of cement products used in construction, as well as masonry cement and oil well cement. In addition, Ash Grove produces ready-mix concrete and aggregates, and through subsidiary Ash Grove Packaging offers a wide range of building products for the contractor and do-it-yourself market, including general purpose portland cement, repair cements, sealers and additives, caulks, sand, stucco, mortar, and decorative rocks. Ash Grove is owned and headed by the fourth generation of the Sunderland family.

Origins in the 19th Century

Ash Grove was not founded by the Sunderland family. Rather, it was established in Ash Grove, Missouri, in 1882 by businessmen James H. Barton, Charles W. Goetz, and W. B. Hill, according to documents held by the Springfield-Greene County Library in Missouri. The leader of the group was Barton. Born in St. Louis in 1844, he was sent to Boston to be raised by an aunt after his mother died and his father headed west to become one of the "forty-niners" who tried their luck in the newly discovered gold fields of northern California. After serving in the Union army during the Civil War, Barton returned to St. Louis and ran an itinerant supply store that followed the construction crews of the St. Louis & San Francisco Railroad Company as they laid tracks toward the West Coast. Barton moved only as far as Pierce City, Missouri, opening a lumber business that he ran for several years before opening a lime kiln, which was fired by large quantities of wood. In 1880 he moved to Ash Grove, where construction for the Springfield & Western Missouri Railroad had uncovered the purest seam of limestone in the United States. Along with partners Goetz and Hill, Barton formed the Ash Grove White Lime Association.

According to contemporaneous accounts, the business was established in 1880. The limestone was crushed, and then cooked in the company's lone kiln, producing an exceptional grade of white lime, the first shipment of which was made in May 1881. During this period lime had a number of uses. It was needed to make plaster as well as the mortar used in the construction of brick and stone buildings. Lime was also a household product used to sanitize outhouses.

Company Incorporated

According to Ash Grove Cement documentation, Ash Grove White Lime was incorporated in 1882 with a capital of $10,000. The company expanded steadily until there were 11 kilns in operation. In addition, Ash Grove White Lime opened a two-kiln plant in Galloway, Missouri, a depot town of the St. Louis & San Francisco Railroad Company. In 1891 the company moved its headquarters to Kansas City, Missouri, a key midwestern rail center.

The demand for traditional uses of lime began to decline late in the decade. Not only did the rise of indoor plumbing lower the need for household lime, but portland cement became the building material of choice, superseding brick and stone construction, thus putting a crimp on the demand for lime used to make mortar. In 1907 Barton died at the age of 64 and in that same year Ash Grove White Lime was reorganized and incorporated as Ash Grove Lime and Portland Cement Company with a capital stock $2.75 million. Some of those funds were used to make the transition to cement production and in 1908 a portland cement plant was opened in Chanute, Kansas.

The company soon ran into financial difficulties, however, and one of its customers, the Sunderland Brothers Company of Omaha, Nebraska, believed it was in its best interest to make sure the business survived. Sunderland had been founded by James A. Sunderland in 1883 to supply coal, cement, lime, and other building materials needed by the fast-growing city of Omaha. Four years later he was joined by his 20-year-old brother, Lester T. Sunderland, who had been working in the coal business in Ottumwa, Iowa, since leaving school at the age of 14.

Sunderland Family Becomes Involved

By the start of the 1900s, Sunderland Brothers was supplying 80 percent of Omaha's building supplies, including Ash Grove white lime. When Ash Grove Lime and Portland Cement began to falter, the Sunderland brothers did not want to lose its business. In 1909 they formed a new company to keep their Omaha business separate and took an ownership position in Ash Grove Lime and Portland Cement. Lester was then dispatched to Kansas City to become vice-president and general manager of this new entity. In 1913 he was elected president of the company.

Under Lester Sunderland's leadership, Ash Grove rebounded and resumed growth, especially prospering during the years of World War I. He also became a respected industry figure. In 1921 he was named president of the Portland Cement Association. During the Roaring Twenties Ash Grove continued to grow and in 1929 the company opened its second cement plant, located in Louisville, Nebraska. However, that was also the year of the stock market crash that precipitated the Great Depression of the 1930s. Poor economic conditions and tight money resulted in a dearth of new construction and a drop in demand for portland cement and lime. The original lime plant in Ash Grove was closed, severing ties with the company's birthplace. Ash Grove Cement was barely able to scrape by during this difficult period, but was still in business when the economy roared back to life in the 1940s, fueled by military spending after the United States entered World War II in late 1941. To help meet demand, a quarry in Springfield, Missouri, was acquired in 1941.

Lester Sunderland continued to head Ash Grove Cement until 1946, when he turned over the presidency to his 50-year-old son, Paul Sunderland. The younger Sunderland had been born in Omaha in 1896 and moved with his parents to Kansas City in 1910. After enrolling at the University of Wisconsin, he left school to enlist in the U.S. Navy during World War I, serving as a mechanic on an escort cruiser that accompanied North Atlantic convoys. Upon his discharge he went to work for the family company at the Springfield, Missouri, operation until returning to Kansas City in 1946 to replace his father, who stayed on as chairman of the executive committee until his death in 1955. Another son, Allan B. Sunderland, four years younger than Paul, also worked for Ash Grove Cement. When their father died, Allan became president and Paul assumed the chairmanship. Just a year later, however, Allan Sunderland died as well.

Ash Grove Cement took advantage of the postwar economic boom that resulted in an abundance of construction projects that required cement. New housing was needed for returning servicemen and their wives, who gave birth to the baby-boom generation that in turn required new hospitals and new schools. New security concerns arising out of the Cold War with the Soviet Union led to the building of the interstate highway system, intended to transport men and materials in the case of war. To keep pace with increasing demand, Ash Grove Cement installed a new kiln in its Louisville plant in 1949, increasing annual production to 375,000 tons.

Name Shortened

The 1960s would bring a host of upgrades to Ash Grove Cement. In 1962 a transfer station was added in Kansas City to accommodate truck deliveries. Two years later the Chanute plant received a much-needed modernization, which increased production capacity from 164,500 tons to 574,000 tons. Also in 1964 the company's present-day lime plant was opened in Portland, Oregon, originally intended as just a Pacific Northwest supplier. During this time the Springfield quarry was abandoned after it had supplied more than six billion pounds of material during nearly 80 years in operation. Moreover, in 1968 the company shortened its name to Ash Grove Cement Company. A year earlier the third generation of the Sunderland family took charge when Paul Sunderland retired as chairman in his early 70s. By this time honorary chairman, he remained active in the business and lived until the age of 107, passing away in 2004 as one of the country's oldest living World War I veterans.

After difficult economic times in the 1970s, Ash Grove Cement resumed its growth in the 1980s. The Louisville plant was expanded in 1982, increasing its annual production capacity to one million tons. The following year the company grew externally, acquiring Durkee, Oregon-based Oregon Portland Cement Co., with plants Durkee, Oregon, and Inkom, Idaho, as well as in British Columbia, Canada. In 1984 a cement plant in Seattle, Washington, was acquired for $23 million from Lone Star Industries, which also included its limestone reserves at Dall Island, Alaska. The following year Ash Grove Cement paid $38 million to Arkla, Inc., for a cement plant in Foreman, Arkansas. The company paid an estimated $25 million in 1987 to acquire a Montana City, Montana, plant, and two years bought another plant in Leamington, Utah.

More changes were to follow in the 1990s. The Seattle plant was expanded and modernized in 1992, and a year later a stake was acquired in North Texas Cement Company, which owned a plant in Midlothian, Texas. By the middle of the decade sales reached $400 million. To maintain production, Ash Grove Cement required massive amounts of fuel to keep its kiln furnaces running. This problem was turned into an opportunity in the 1990s when the company developed a new revenue stream by collecting other companies' flammable wastes, such as industrial cleaners, paint residues, and printing solvents--items that were not permitted to be buried in landfills. The materials were burned to supplement the usual coal, providing a significant savings on fuel bills. When flammable wastes became scarcer, Ash Grove Cement turned its attention to old tires, for which the company was paid between 50 cents and $1 to remove. The kilns, burning at 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit, were able to consume virtually the entire tire, even vaporizing the steel in steel-belted radials.

Building Toward the Future

Ash Grove Cement took advantage of a building boom that began in the 1990s and extended into the new century, when the company continued to invest in expansion. Ground was broken in October 1999 on a $160 million modernization and expansion project in Chanute. In 2000 the company acquired Lyman-Richey Corp., an Omaha, Nebraska-based concrete company with a history almost as long as Ash Grove Cement. It was established in Lawrence, Kansas, in 1884, moved to Nebraska eight years later, and began operating in Omaha in 1929. Ash Grove Cement bolstered its position in the Texas market in 2002 when the rest of the Midlothian plant was acquired. In the meantime, the Chanute project was completed, resulting in a new dry process plant, which replaced a wet process plant that had been in operation for close to a century. In addition the facility received a 40,000-square-foot core building, a massive geodesic storage dome, bins, mills, and silos.

A new headquarters was opened in Overland Park, Kansas, in 2003, followed by a number of other advances. The company joined forces with San Antonio, Texas-based Alamo Cement Co. and Texas Lehigh Cement Company in 2004 to build a terminal on the Port of Houston, a facility that opened in August 2006, the same year that the Portland terminal was upgraded. For the first time since 1929 Ash Grove decided to build a plant, rather than acquire, announcing in 2005 that it planned to construct a plant in Moapa, Nevada. Although the construction industry was turning soft, Ash Grove cement was undeterred about building the new plant because it viewed the investment from a long-term perspective, the growth potential of the region for the next half-century. It was that same mind-set taken by the company in 2007 when it began work on a $190 million expansion of the Foreman, Arkansas, plant.

Principal Subsidiaries

Ash Grove Packaging; Kansas City Ready-Mix Group; Lyman-Rich Corp.; Permanent Paving, Inc.

Principal Competitors

Cemex, S.A. de C.V.; Holcim (US), Inc.; Lafarge North America, Inc.

Further Reading

"Ash Grove Celebrates Plant Upgrade with Open House," Concrete Products, November 2001, p. 55.

"Ash Grove Cement Will Build HQ in Overland Park," Kansas City Business Journal, March 20, 2001.

Crumpley, Charles R. T., "Cement Is Not Firm's Sole Trade," Kansas City Star, August 19, 1997, p. D7.

Hillix, Danielle, "Area's Last Known WWI Vet Dies at 107," Kansas City Star, January 13, 2004, p. B1.

Wilkerson, Jan, "New Players Churn Up Cement, Concrete Market," Business Journal-Portland, May 11, 1987, p. 8.

— Ed Dinger