Harris started in 1948 as Charles Harris Plumbing Company on University Avenue in St. Paul and now runs more than 4,000 employees out of 21 regional offices across a dozen states. The firm dropped the older “Harris Companies” name in 2018. From its headquarters at 909 Montreal Circle in St. Paul, it covers design and engineering, construction, building automation, service, manufacturing and conveyor systems, which makes it one of the larger self-performing mechanical contractors in the country. Harris held the mechanical scope on the Minnesota State Capitol restoration, awarded in June 2013, covering plumbing, HVAC piping, sheet metal and controls in a building where fifteen custom fan-wall air handlers had to fit into basement rooms with roughly eight feet of headroom. It also did design-assist mechanical on Allegiant Stadium.
The corporate name has changed four times, and each change marked a real handover. Charles Harris opened Charles Harris Plumbing Company at 474 University Avenue in 1948, after seventeen years building the Harris Brothers business with his brother Aaron. In 1954 he bought the Yoerg’s Brewery Company building and moved to 229 Ohio Street. The firm became Harris Stewart Companies in 1959 when Charles handed over to his son Ron and son-in-law Sheldon Stewart. Harris Mechanical Contracting was incorporated in 1983 with Robert Hosch as president, after the Harris Stewart divisions were sold to three employees. The move to 909 Montreal Circle came in 1997.
Michel Michno was named CEO in 2021, and the acquisition pace has picked up since. In 2025 the firm bought Climate Control Inc. of Fargo, FitzGerald Contractors of Shreveport and Direct Digital Control of Sioux Falls; 2026 brought Energy Services of Colorado, Centennial Controls and Climate Engineering, and D.R. Associates. Design studios opened in Oakland in 2020 and Arlington, Virginia in 2022.
Fabrication is a real part of the business rather than a support function. The St. Paul shop consolidated with HiMEC in 2007 to form Midwest Fabrication and Supply at Zumbrota, Minnesota, and the manufacturing side now covers sheet metal, pipe and plumbing, specialty products and packaging conveyors.
The building automation scope extends past HVAC controls into lighting controls, security systems and integration, with a proprietary building-monitoring product marketed as Telemetry. Service covers emergency response, preventive maintenance, central plant services and energy management.
On the front end, design and engineering includes BIM and VDC, design-build and design-assist delivery, and value engineering – the capability behind prefabrication and modularisation on the construction side. The firm publishes an ESG report alongside the usual corporate material.
