Kiewit grew from an Omaha brick crew into a contractor its employees own
A masonry contractor’s youngest son took over the family firm, carried it through the Depression on highway work and put it in the hands of its employees.
Omaha, NE
In 1924, the younger Peter Kiewit took his first role with his family’s company. He was superintendent on the Livestock Exchange Building in Omaha, the firm’s first million-dollar project. Born in 1900 and a member of Omaha Central High School’s class of 1918, he would go on to lead the business for nearly six decades.
By then the company was 40 years old. Two brothers, Peter and Andrew Kiewit, formed Kiewit Brothers in 1884 as a masonry contractor laying brick in Omaha. In 1889 they won the masonry contract for the seven-story Lincoln Hotel. In 1900 they built the Bekins Warehouse, their first commercial building as general contractors. The partnership broke apart in 1904. The elder Peter kept going on his own, and his sons Ralph and George later renamed the business Peter Kiewit Sons.
Kiewit is now one of North America’s largest construction and engineering organizations, working through subsidiaries in the United States, Canada, Mexico and Guam. Its company magazine listed 31,100 staff and craft employees at the end of 2024. It is employee-owned, an arrangement that took shape under the younger Peter Kiewit. Every chief executive since 1979 has come up inside the company: a former water boy, a onetime intern, a mine engineer and a part-time hire.
The younger Peter made the company his in 1931. He dissolved the family firm and reorganized it as Peter Kiewit Sons’ Co., then assembled a core group and board of directors to run it. Under his leadership the company went after highway and public works contracts.
In 1932, Kiewit won its first major highway contract, a 25-mile stretch of grading and paving in Nebraska. By the mid-1930s it was building highways in Wyoming, Colorado and North Dakota. That work kept the company growing through the Depression and turned a local contractor into a national one.
The war made it bigger. In 1939, Kiewit took its largest contract to that point, building 760 barracks and related facilities at Fort Lewis, Washington. The company finished in 90 days. In 1941, it went into Canada to help move equipment and supplies for a crude oil pipeline from a refinery at Norman Wells in the Northwest Territories. In 1943, it went into coal mining at the Big Horn Mine near Sheridan, Wyoming.
After the war came the large public works of the era. Kiewit played a key role on California’s Friant-Kern Canal in 1946, North Dakota’s Garrison Dam in 1948 and the Atomic Energy Commission’s $1.2 billion Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Ohio in 1952. It worked on the High Arctic Air Base at Thule, Greenland, in 1951. When the Federal Highway Act of 1956 called for an Interstate Highway System, Kiewit built more lane miles of it than any other contractor. Beginning in 1971, it worked on the James Bay hydroelectric projects in Quebec, and through the 1990s it built more of that development than any other contractor.
Closer to home, the Nebraska State Capitol is among the landmarks credited to Pete Kiewit, the builder. He bought the Omaha World-Herald to keep it a locally owned newspaper. Under his direction, the Kiewit businesses, the paper included, became employee-owned.
He was also a benefactor in Omaha. One of his first significant public gifts went to Creighton University in 1964 for Kiewit Hall, which began as a women’s residence hall. In 1978, Creighton declared him a “Founder of the University,” only the second person to receive the honor there. In a speech around that time, quoted on Creighton University’s alumni website, he compared the two families. “Both the Creighton and the Kiewit families were builders,” he said. “They both had confidence in the future of the West that brought them to Omaha.”
He died in 1979 at 78.
The ownership structure is unusual, and the company spelled it out in a 2008 letter to the Financial Accounting Standards Board. Peter Kiewit Sons’ had one class of common stock, sold at a formula price based on the company’s book value and set once a year. The shares could not be traded on any market. They could only be sold back to the company, and when an owner’s employment ended for any reason, the shares had to go back. The company told the board that its stockholders were the only owners of the firm.
Walter Scott Jr., who became chairman and chief executive in 1979, learned the business on job sites. He grew up in Omaha and went to Colorado A&M, now Colorado State University, planning on a life in farming and ranching until an older friend, Gene Miller, steered him toward engineering. “In those days, you didn’t go around looking at all the schools in the country,” Scott said in a 2020 conversation with Greg Abel for UNMC’s iEXCEL Holographic Interview Series. “You went to a school.”
He interned at Kiewit during college, starting as a water boy, and joined the company as an engineer after graduating. He left for a while to serve in the Air Force during the Korean War. When he came back, he moved his family to 17 job sites in 12 years, rising from foreman to superintendent to district manager. Peter Kiewit became his mentor. Scott served as president until 1998.
“He was basically a builder, whether he was building Kiewit and physical things or building his vision of Omaha or Nebraska,” Warren Buffett, Scott’s childhood friend, told the Omaha World-Herald. “He was nonstop.”
The habit of promoting from within held. Ken Stinson joined as an intern in 1969 and became chairman and CEO of Peter Kiewit Sons’ in 1998. Bruce Grewcock arrived in 1982 as chief engineer at the company’s Black Butte Coal Mine near Rock Springs, Wyoming, and became CEO in 2005, with Stinson staying on as chairman. “The end of this year will be a transition, not a farewell,” Stinson said in the company’s 2004 announcement of the change. Rick Lanoha, who started at Kiewit as a part-time employee in 1986, has been president and CEO since 2020.
The jobs grew more complicated. In 1991, the company took on its first large design-build transportation megaproject, the $802 million San Joaquin Hills Transportation Corridor in California. In 1997, it began buying engineering firms to build its own design staff for power plant work. After a disaster at the Oroville Dam in California, the nation’s tallest, Kiewit rebuilt two massive spillways in under 18 months, finishing in 2019. In 2023, it acquired Weeks Marine, expanding its marine construction and dredging work. On the Klamath River, according to the company’s magazine, its crews finished the largest dam removal project in the Western Hemisphere ahead of schedule, restoring the lower river’s natural flow so salmon could reach their ancestral spawning grounds for the first time in more than a century.
Headquarters never left Omaha. The company’s 203,000-square-foot building in the city’s north downtown was completed in 2021.
A few blocks south, in downtown Omaha, stands the Joslyn art museum, which Kiewit built in the 1930s. Nearly a century later, Kiewit crews were back at the Joslyn, delivering the museum’s new space.