R.E. Pierson Construction Company

R.E. Pierson Construction Company is a heavy civil and marine contractor based in Pilesgrove Township, New Jersey, founded in 1946 and still family operated. The firm self-performs site development, roadway and paving work, bridge construction, pile driving and marine construction across the Delaware Valley, and runs its own materials operations supplying aggregate and asphalt to its jobs. Its most visible recent work is the Delaware Memorial Bridge ship collision protection system, an $93 million project for the Delaware River and Bay Authority completed in 2025 and formally celebrated in August 2026, which required driving 150 interlocked 115-foot sheet piles for each of eight 80-foot-diameter dolphin cells around the bridge towers. The company works primarily for state departments of transportation, bi-state authorities and municipal owners across New Jersey, Delaware, Pennsylvania and Maryland.

The company that shows up on New Jersey Department of Transportation bid tabs today began with a teenager and a used backhoe. Richard Pierson traded his F-150 pickup for that first machine in 1975 and worked for himself for several years before incorporating Richard E. Pierson Construction Co., Inc. in September 1980. A first union contract followed in 1982, and a 1985 joint venture on Route 295 opened the door to NJDOT work. The company pushed into Delaware and Pennsylvania in 1986, bought its first barges in 1998 to enter the marine market, and won its first design-build award in 1999. It acquired the Pilesgrove property that still serves as headquarters in 2001, passed $200 million in annual revenue by fiscal 2008, and added a regional office, shop and yard in Kutztown, Pennsylvania in 2019. Employment passed 400 by 2022.

Pierson groups its self-performed work into seven lines: demolition, marine, foundations, structures, earthwork, paving and material processing. The marine fleet includes sectional barges, deck barges, temporary trestle and push boats, used on bulkheads, fender installation and wharf construction and demolition. Foundations work ranges from cantilevered sheet pile walls to jetting thirty-inch square prestressed concrete piles, with company-owned vibratory and impact hammers sized to the job. The material processing group runs excavator-mounted attachments, mobile screens and crushers to rework dirt, rock and concrete on site. Demolition is the one line the firm markets nationally, with completed work on the 11th Street Bridge over the Anacostia River, the Goethals Bridge and the Meridian Building.

Project names give a sense of the range. The NJ Windport test pile program called for jetting and driving more than 1,700 square concrete piles between 85 and 115 feet long. Other recent jobs include innerberth improvements and combi wall construction at Tradepoint Atlantic, the Rumson-Sea Bright Bridge, PennDOT work on SR 202 Section 320, resurfacing on the New Jersey Turnpike, and the replacement of Bridge S-32, where a wider double-leaf bascule span is being built south of the existing bridge.

Safety is managed through an Activity Hazard Analysis that supervisors use to train crews, backed by daily and weekly safety meetings, daily jobsite inspections and management-level audits. Offices sit in Pilesgrove and Williamstown, New Jersey, Kutztown, Pennsylvania, and New Castle, Delaware. The Cecil Yard in Williamstown, bought in 1989 as the company’s first main office, is still in operation.