The Utah Construction Company was a construction company founded by Edmund Orson Wattis Jr., Warren L. Wattis and William. H. Wattis in 1900.

History

A short four years after its founding, the company was awarded the contract to build the Feather River train route between

Oakland Oakland is the largest city and the county seat of Alameda County, California, United States. A major West Coast port, Oakland is the largest city in the East Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area, the third largest city overall in the Bay ...

and

Salt Lake City Salt Lake City (often shortened to Salt Lake and abbreviated as SLC) is the capital and most populous city of Utah, United States. It is the seat of Salt Lake County, the most populous county in Utah. With a population of 200,133 in 2020, th ...

. This $60 million contract was challenging, but after five years, very profitable. The

Feather River The Feather River is the principal tributary of the Sacramento River, in the Sacramento Valley of Northern California. The river's main stem is about long. Its length to its most distant headwater tributary is just over . The main stem Feather ...

route was completed for the

Western Pacific Railroad The Western Pacific Railroad was a Class I railroad in the United States. It was formed in 1903 as an attempt to break the near-monopoly the Southern Pacific Railroad had on rail service into northern California. WP's Feather River Route dire ...

in 1911. The Utah Construction Company thrived and soon captured a large share of the tunneling, grading, and track projects for the rapidly expanding railroads in the mountain west. Seeing the end of railroad expansion, the

Wattis Brothers The Wattis Brothers was a 19th-century railway contracting firm operated by three brothers Edmund Orson Wattis Jr. (1855–1934), Warren L. Wattis, and William Henry Wattis (1859–1931). It was founded in the early 1880s by William and Edmund to ...

looked for ways to diversify their construction risks. In 1917, Utah Construction Company was awarded the $7 million O'Shaughnessy Dam contract, a controversial project that impounds the

Tuolumne River The Tuolumne River (Yokutsan: ''Tawalimnu'') flows for through Central California, from the high Sierra Nevada to join the San Joaquin River in the Central Valley. Originating at over above sea level in Yosemite National Park, the Tuolumne ...

in the Hetch Hetchy Valley of

California California is a state in the Western United States, located along the Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the most populous U.S. state and the 3rd largest by area. It is also the m ...

Sierra Nevada The Sierra Nevada () is a mountain range in the Western United States, between the Central Valley of California and the Great Basin. The vast majority of the range lies in the state of California, although the Carson Range spur lies primar ...

mountains. Success with the O'Shaughnessy Dam convinced the Wattis Brothers to bid on more dam projects. In 1922, Utah Construction Company formed a partnership with Morrison-Knudsen of

Boise Boise (, , ) is the capital and most populous city of the U.S. state of Idaho and is the county seat of Ada County. On the Boise River in southwestern Idaho, it is east of the Oregon border and north of the Nevada border. The downtown area' ...

. With Frank Crowe as the chief engineer, the MK-UC partnership successfully built dams throughout the American west. In 1931, the Wattis Brothers spearheaded the formation of

Six Companies Six Companies, Inc. was a joint venture of construction companies that was formed to build the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River in Nevada and Arizona. They later built Parker Dam, a portion of the Grand Coulee Dam, the Colorado River Aqueduct ...

to build the

Hoover Dam Hoover Dam is a concrete arch-gravity dam in the Black Canyon of the Colorado River, on the border between the U.S. states of Nevada and Arizona. It was constructed between 1931 and 1936 during the Great Depression and was dedicated on S ...

, which was the largest construction project ever tackled by the US Government up to the time. Including the Hoover Dam, Utah Construction built 58 dams between 1916 and 1969. In 1942, several weeks after the Japanese

bombing of Pearl Harbor The attack on Pearl HarborAlso known as the Battle of Pearl Harbor was a surprise military strike by the Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service upon the United States against the naval base at Pearl Harbor in Honolulu, Territory of Haw ...

, Japanese warships were sighted in Alaskan waters. No overland route existed connecting Alaska with the contiguous United States. This situation spurred the American Government to plan and build the Alaskan Army Highway, later renamed the

Alaska Highway