Shook Construction

Shook Construction is a Dayton, Ohio general contractor and construction manager founded in 1926, with water and wastewater treatment among its strongest markets alongside healthcare, industrial and higher education work. The firm operates across Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana and Tennessee and marks its centennial in 2026. In August 2026 the City of Dayton selected Shook as construction manager at risk for a $350 million ion exchange PFAS removal facility and retrofit at the 96-million-gallon-per-day Ottawa Water Treatment Plant, billed as the largest dedicated PFAS facility in the country. The work runs through 2031 while the plant stays in service.

Charles H. Shook founded Chas. H. Shook Inc. in Dayton in 1926. The first significant jobs were the Frigidaire Plant, the Third National Bank Building and Oakwood High School. The 1930s brought the National Cash Register Building, Good Samaritan Hospital and the Christian Science Church. A 1948 sewage treatment plant in Newark, Ohio was the first water job, and water resources is now one of four market channels alongside education, healthcare and industrial.

The firm counts more than 500 team members and runs eight offices grouped into four regions: Central, Midwest, Great Lakes and Mid-Atlantic. Headquarters is at 2000 W. Dorothy Lane in Moraine, just outside Dayton, with an equipment center on Ontario Avenue in Dayton itself. The other offices are in Brecksville and Columbus, Ohio; Indianapolis, Kokomo and Richmond, Indiana; and Apex, North Carolina.

Water work covers both treatment and wastewater. Shook built the $43 million ozone treatment facility at Toledo’s Collins Park plant, added after a 2014 algal bloom left more than 500,000 residents without drinking water. It delivered the $44.5 million Northwest Regional Water Treatment Plant upgrade for Greene County Sanitary Engineering in Xenia as design-builder with AECOM, adding gravity sand filters, reverse osmosis membrane softening and a new SCADA system. In North Carolina it is working on a $62 million wastewater plant upgrade in Siler City and has finished sidestream deammonification work at Raleigh’s Neuse River resource recovery facility.

Outside water, recent projects include the $32.5 million Welcome Stadium renovation for Dayton Public Schools, biology teaching labs at Case Western Reserve, a 100,000-square-foot aircraft maintenance hangar in Vandalia for Sierra Nevada Corporation, and a design-build conversion of a 60-year-old Indianapolis building into Bila Solar’s North American headquarters. At Chrysler’s five Kokomo plants Shook has run more than 2,200 jobs since 2011, self-performing demolition, excavation, concrete and rough carpentry with roughly 25 craftsmen on site at any given time.

The safety program runs under the motto S.T.E.P. Safely: Speak Up, Teach, Encourage, Protect. Shook also hires co-op students each semester, and its last five chief executives each started as a co-op or as a recent graduate.