Dunn Construction Company

Dunn Construction Company is a Birmingham, Alabama paving contractor and asphalt producer founded in 1878 as The Dunn Brothers Construction Company in Virginia, originally as a railroad builder. It runs hot-mix asphalt plants at East Thomas, Tarrant, Lakeshore and Longview and works in asphalt paving, aggregates and trucking across the Birmingham metro and Jefferson, Shelby and Chilton counties. Recent work includes the Birmingham Airport Authority Taxiway H Connector, which took the 2025 NAPA Ray Brown Airport Asphalt Pavement Award and an AGC BuildSouth award, plus I-20/59 paving rehabilitation, I-65 in Chilton County, US-31 and the Red Mountain Expressway. In August 2026 the Justice Department named Dunn as the approved buyer of two Memphis-area asphalt plants divested under the APAC-Tennessee consent decree.

Five asphalt mix designs sit behind most of what Dunn puts down. Superpave is the dense-graded workhorse for roadways and parking lots, with mixes sized from 3/8 inch to 1 1/2 inch. Stone Matrix Asphalt is the gap-graded option, built around stone-on-stone contact and a stronger modified binder for high-traffic lanes, and it also cuts tire noise and improves wet-weather friction. Open Graded Friction Course goes down in thin lifts over dense-graded pavement in high-speed corridors so water drains through rather than pooling. Cold Mix stores for long periods and travels well, which suits patching and jobs too far out for hot mix. Reclaimed asphalt pavement, crushed from old roads, is sold as a driveway and parking surface that resists erosion when used in place of fill dirt.

Quality control is handled in-house. Dunn’s QC/QA personnel are ALDOT-certified in the design and testing of bituminous concrete and train through Alabama Asphalt Pavement Association coursework, and the company has spent more than a decade in a national research effort aimed at longer-lasting pavement.

The plant and yard network reaches past the Birmingham core. Alongside the East Thomas, Lakeshore, Tarrant and Longview asphalt plants, Dunn runs a plant at Childersburg, and the Tarrant site handles slag as well as asphalt. Aggregate production comes out of Longview Aggregate at 991 Highway 31 South in Saginaw and the North Montgomery Aggregate Facility at 2194 Providence Road in Titus, both supplying crushed limestone, sand and related products for delivery or customer pickup. A 39th Street shop in Birmingham serves as the operations centre.

Recycling has been part of the operation for years. Reclaimed asphalt and roofing, steel foundry sand and slag all go back into new mix. Dunn ran the first Warm Mix asphalt test section for ALDOT and uses Cold Mix routinely, both of which take less energy to produce than Hot Mix, and the company works with owners pursuing LEED credits.

Plant-level recognition has been steady: East Thomas, Tarrant, Lakeshore and Longview each took NAPA Diamond Achievement Awards in 2023 and again in 2024. Other project awards include a 2024 ABC Excellence in Construction first place in Infrastructure Heavy for US-31 through Thorsby and Clanton, NAPA Quality in Construction awards for SR-119 in Shelby County and US 78 in Leeds, and an Alabama Asphalt Paving Association award for the BNSF Birmingham Automotive Facility.

The Birmingham roots predate the paving business. In the early 1900s Dunn bored a tunnel nearly half a mile through Red Mountain that carried the young city’s fresh water from the Cahaba River. It entered general construction in 1940, mostly on military work, and added Dunn Real Estate in 2004 to offer build-to-suit and turnkey development alongside its building capability.