C.W. Matthews Contracting Co.

C.W. Matthews Contracting Co. has built Georgia roads since 1946. The Marietta-based civil contractor started after World War II and grew with the state’s highway and airport network. It now paves asphalt and concrete, runs its own asphalt plants, builds bridges, handles grading and utilities, and takes on design-build work across the Southeast through offices in Pooler, Ga., and St. Johns, Fla. Its current headline job is the I-285/I-20 West Interchange in Atlanta, and recent work includes runway rehab at Peachtree DeKalb Airport. This week Bedrock Robotics named C.W. Matthews among seven new customers for its autonomous excavator kit. That’s a notable test for a firm whose work is mostly roadway, not open-site mass excavation.

Thirty asphalt plants. That is the figure that separates this contractor from a paving company that buys its mix, and it is the reason a Georgia Department of Transportation schedule can be held through a hot summer when regional supply tightens.

The expertise pages break into six areas: asphalt paving and construction, asphalt plants and manufacturing, bridges and structures, concrete paving and construction, design-build, and grading and utilities, with site development named alongside them. Having both asphalt and concrete paving in-house matters on interchange work, where the mainline and the structures often call for different materials under the same contract.

The company states it self-performs the majority of its work. On roadway jobs that usually means grading, drainage, structures and paving all under its own crews, which is what makes a schedule recoverable when weather costs a week.

Offices sit in Marietta, with additional locations in Pooler, Georgia, and St. Johns, Florida, and the stated service area is the Southeast.

Two project types show up in the current and recent work. The I-285 and I-20 West Interchange in Atlanta is the headline job. Runway 16-34 rehabilitation at Peachtree DeKalb Airport is the other, and airfield paving is a different discipline from highway paving: tighter smoothness tolerances, night work windows, and an owner who cannot close the facility.

Backlog is stated as more than a year’s worth of contracted work on the books, which for a civil contractor is a reasonable health indicator and a signal to subcontractors about bidding capacity.

One caution for anyone reading the marketing copy: the site gives inconsistent figures for company age, citing over 60 years, 80 years and close to a century in different places. The 1946 founding date is the one that reconciles with 80 years, and the others appear to be stale copy rather than competing claims.

The site names no certification, safety award or trade association, and publishes no headcount or fleet size. For a contractor of this scale those are standard prequalification items and are worth requesting directly rather than inferring from the plant count.

Sources: https://cwmatthews.com/, https://cwmatthews.com/about/, https://cwmatthews.com/about/history/, https://cwmatthews.com/expertise/, https://cwmatthews.com/projects/, https://cwmatthews.com/contact/