The bricklayer behind McHenry Masonry hires the kind of teenager he used to be
After a union pre-apprenticeship and years restoring Twin Cities landmarks, Andre McHenry built a St. Paul masonry company that hires high school students and gives people second chances.
St. Paul, MN
Before he turned 25, Andre McHenry had done restoration work on the Minnesota State Capitol, the Mill City Museum and the Grain Belt Brewery. A few years earlier he had finished high school with no idea what came next.
“In high school you get slapped with a test and expected to just know what you are going to do,” he said in a 2019 profile published by the Construction Careers Foundation. Then he heard that another student had been offered a job right away in the trades. He read up online, asked a social worker how to get in, and before long he was enrolled in the pre-apprenticeship program of Local 1 of the Bricklayers and Allied Craftworkers.
In 2020 McHenry registered his own company, McHenry Masonry, in St. Paul. Its crews rebuild chimneys, tuckpoint foundations, repair brick steps and build retaining walls and outdoor fireplaces; one customer’s project was a 180-foot granite wall with a fireplace, stairs and drainage. McHenry says the company has about 60 employees, and he hires with his own start in mind. The company hires students from local high schools, he wrote in a 2025 Q&A with CanvasRebel, and gives “people who messed up in life a chance and opportunity to become someone,” whatever their background or race.
McHenry grew up without much to lean on. The 2019 profile notes that he had no significant role models and took on much of the work of raising his younger brother. “I grew up poor,” he says. “And I got tired of watching my neighborhood famished, so I just looked for a way to feed me and everybody around me.” He used to be, in his words, “a product of my environment.”
“So, now, I’m trying to break those chains,” he says.
The union was his way in. He logged 2,000 hours in the pre-apprenticeship, which counted toward his full apprenticeship, and two years after that he was a journeyman. “The more experienced bricklayers really care about helping train us,” he said in the 2019 Construction Careers Foundation profile. “They see us as their little brothers.”
He worked his way up for about nine years, he told Voyage Minnesota in 2022, and was made a foreman. “I was the youngest foreman for my company,” he says. “I was a union supe and a teacher for the union as well.” The climb was not easy. “I’ve dealt with being racially profiled and a large amount of racism,” he wrote in the CanvasRebel Q&A. He wrote that it taught him to have thick skin and to let his work and personality do the talking.
When he went out on his own, he picked the work he thought was being neglected. “I started my own business in masonry and focused on an area that really needed help and that was residential,” he told Voyage Minnesota.
He brought restoration habits to houses. On an old building, he told Voyage Minnesota, the goal is a repair nobody can see. “We make the building look as if there was never a problem with it and has stayed in its natural state,” he said. On a house, that often comes down to finding the right brick. One customer wrote that the crew located reclaimed brick to match an old house before restoring its exterior. Another customer’s father had made a brick flower planter almost 70 years earlier. A gutter problem and water damage had left it crumbling. The company rebuilt it and capped it with stone in place of the old wood top.
McHenry still makes the first visit himself. “Me as the owner I like to go and meet each customer personally,” he wrote in the CanvasRebel Q&A. Sometimes that visit shrinks the job. One customer called him for a second opinion after being told their chimney had to be rebuilt. He came out within a few days and said the problems were minor and a rebuild was not needed, the customer wrote. They hired the company for the repairs and then for more: tuckpointing the foundation and fixing the columns and capstones on the front steps. The crew came back to acid-wash the foundation a second time because the crew was not satisfied with the first result.
“I still like to help homeowners out,” he says. “I got small jobs, too.” One homeowner’s concrete chimney crown had cracked badly enough that rain worked its way into the ceiling. Terry F. wrote in a Google review that McHenry did not send a whole team for a one-man job. A single mason brought scaffolding up to the roof, replaced the cracked crown with new concrete and recaulked the flashing in a couple of late-day visits.
The office work falls to McHenry. “I do the payroll, I do the scheduling, I do the visits with the homeowners,” he says. Then there are the crews. “I got a bunch of young guys. I got a bunch of older guys,” he says. “I got to try to keep everybody happy, get them loaded up with material.”
He also runs what he calls a team building program after work. In the CanvasRebel Q&A he described taking the crew paintballing and on road trips, holding barbecues and feeding the homeless together. “I get a kick out of watching boys become men and make that leap from being a boy to becoming a man,” he wrote. “A responsible adult.” Some of his workers as young as 18, he wrote, were mentoring younger kids in their own neighborhoods. After a chimney repair, Alanna R. wrote in a Google review that McHenry believes in empowering young people in the community and has created apprenticeship opportunities in the field.
He keeps studying the craft himself. In the same Q&A he wrote that he had spent the previous four years traveling to sacred places and very old monuments to learn why their buildings have lasted so long. “It’s like the funnest homework to do traveling and learning,” he wrote.
The company takes commercial jobs as well as houses, and he says he has no preference. “As long as my guys are busy and they can feed their families, that’s all I care about,” he says.
People offer to buy the company every other week, he says. He has no interest. “I’m never selling my company,” he says. “It’s my family name, a legacy.”