From 1925 to today, construction has moved from mules and steam engines to GPS-guided equipment, from overalls and fedora hats to SMART protective apparel, from party-line phones requiring a switchboard operator to instant cell and satellite connections, from paper spreadsheets to personal tablets, from hand-nailed structures with hand-mixed concrete to 3D printed and prefabricated buildings.

“Time and modernization have not changed the culture of the company. T. A. Loving Company remains faithful to its founder’s vision to provide meaningful and rewarding careers to generations of families. Commitment to excellence in construction has fostered such pride in our workforce that “Loving Life” is now our hashtag, joining the long-time T. A. Loving plumb bob insignia. I can retire with a grateful heart, knowing T. A. Loving Company’s future is in very capable hands.” – Sam Hunter, Chairman of the Board

TALCO built a classroom building at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine in Chapel Hill in 1970, then returned half a century later, tore it down, and in 2023 completed a new Medical Education Building on the same footprint—with the demolition actually costing more than the original construction.

TALCO has left its thumbprint in health care across the Carolinas, building a surgical center for Wayne UNC Health Care just a mile and a half as the crow flies from its company headquarters in Goldsboro. Brett Bond, a healthcare senior project manager and a T. A. Loving Company employee since his summer internships starting in 2006, supervised that surgical center in Goldsboro from 2015-16.

In 2021, he watched his one-year-old son treated in that very facility for an ear infection.“We came in through the door and into the lobby we’d built, into the triage room we’d built, into the E.R. we’d built and then back up the post-op room we’d built,” Bond says. “I saw every bit of it come together. It gave you quite a sense of pride to see the work you’d done be put to good use—and in my case, see your own son treated in that hospital.”

The Country Club of North Carolina in Pinehurst in the early 1960s was the first of a coming genre of golf course communities by offering a golf course, residences, and a variety of recreational amenities within a gated community, and its founding members were among the movers and shakers in the North Carolina business community.

That they would hire T. A. Loving Company to handle the roads and sewer construction was a feather in the company’s hat. Company President Raymond Bryan Jr. joined the club and built a home along the sixteenth hole of the Dogwood Course that remains in the family today.

TALCO has enhanced urban landscapes from Raleigh to the coast, appropriately enough given that Raymond Bryan Sr., the company president from 1947-69, was at the forefront of developing Raleigh’s Cameron Village, one of the nation’s first open-air shopping centers.

“Everyone associates T. A. Loving Company with our Building Division because it’s so visual, but if we don’t do the water and sewer, this world comes to a crashing halt,” says Paul Hunter, Senior Vice President and son of Ann and Sam Hunter. “Dad has said as long as I can remember the need for water and sewer will always be there. But that part of our work is buried. You never know it’s there.”

“I cross bridges everywhere I go and I say, ‘Well, I worked on this one and I worked on that one,’” Stephen Salter says. “When you’re driving eastern North Carolina, you won’t go many roads where you won’t have driven over a bridge that we’ve built. You head to the coast, you’re going to cross a T. A. Loving Company bridge.”

David Weil, a longstanding businessman in Goldsboro, has used T. A. Loving Company for a variety of projects over half a century.“If you do business in construction, if you build things and you’re a developer, you will have an eventual falling out with most builders,” he says. “You will run into things that you don’t like, or they don’t do it the way you want, or you don’t get the finished product that you want. But I never had one episode of that with T. A. Loving Company. They are just top notch and it would be hard for me to over-express my high opinion and regard for them.”

A hundred years is something to be proud of. You see a lot of construction companies do not make it. You see some big names out there that just faded out and went away. David Philyaw, who joined the company in 2004 and became the Building Business Unit President in 2023, was speaking to a group of East Carolina University students one time and was asked how big was the company and where does TALCO work? “Let me answer this way,” Philyaw said. “There is a ninety-nine-percent chance you’ve either been in a building that we’ve built or been across a bridge that we built or drank water that came out of a pipe that we put in the ground. And not many companies can say that.

“This company is very respected within the industry,” says Bob Ferguson, a senior vice president and decades-long veteran in the construction business. “T. A. Loving Company does what it says it’s going to do. There’s not a lot of fanfare, not a lot of flash. We just keep doing what we’ve done for a century. That’s an honorable thing, and this is an honorable company.”

Jerry Smith, former Senior Vice President of the Utilities Division and longtime employee, remembers the company Christmas dinner in 2021, looking around the room and marveling at all the years and decades represented at the gathering. “I was with the company forty-eight years, and there were people there who’d been there fifty or more,” Smith says. “The company wouldn’t have lasted so long if not for the people. I feel lucky being one of them, and that’s why I keep coming back here.”

“You’ve got to like construction and you’ve got to like to build things,” says Bob Ferguson, who grew up on a farm outside Concord. “You’ve got to like seeing people’s dreams become reality. And if those three things are part of your core values, if that’s a part of your nature, then T. A. Loving Company has been and remains today a great place to be.”

Tony, Edgar, and Timmy Humphrey have worked collectively for nearly 155 years for T. A. Loving Company, and the brothers have seen it and done it all. They have dodged alligators while replacing sewer lines. They have dug a tunnel by hand shovel under a railroad track near Echo Farms. They have crawled through a tunnel in Kinston and scraped out dirt two feet beyond a boring pipe, thrown the dirt on a wagon, wheeled it out by rope, and repeated the process over and over.

“It’s hard to find people who really want to work hard now,” Edgar says. “They want the job but really don’t want to get out and sweat. Any construction work is physical work. It can be hard, but it’s how you make it.”

“By and large, my time and Ty’s time is spent making sure our people are in good shape and enjoying what they are doing,” David Philyaw says. “We help them resolve problems when they need it, but most of your job is to empower everyone to make good decisions and run a project like it’s your business.” Edmondson, “We want every person here to be the best they can be. If you are a laborer and that’s what you aspire to, we want you to be the best laborer in the company. If you want to move up through the ranks, that opportunity is there. We have a strong entrepreneurial culture here. If you want to pursue a particular type of job or a particular type of market, if you come up with a plan that makes sense, we’ll support you. That’s powerful in an organization where people have that freedom.”

“Your history is a guide,” Edmondson says. “Our history is very rich. It shows you how you got this far. But you can’t get complacent. We want to maintain that opportunity for everyone to be able to excel. This company is a shining star, a North Star, if you will. It takes effort and work and continual improvement to maintain that culture. It’s more than a revenue goal. We want to be a good place for good people to work.”

“I wish my father and uncle T. A. could have known that their work would be so respected and acknowledged by this remarkable gathering,” Ann Hunter said in accepting the awards. “They would be so proud to know that T. A. Loving Company for almost a century has provided employment for so many generations of families, where brothers, fathers, sons, and daughters have found meaningful, rewarding careers. A sense of family persists even today.” Added Paul Hunter: “They left a lasting mark across our great state as well as this country.

Ferguson sits in his Raleigh office in March 2022, knowing in several years he’ll help appoint someone to take that spot. “The people are the most important thing because the clients buy the people,” he says. “Your clients buy the people because the people provide the service. And so I think the organic growth comes from them finding those people. The internal makeup of the person who sits in this chair is important—a T. A. Loving Company kind of person.”

“It’s something different every day, no two jobs are the same,” says Edgar Humphrey. “I’ve enjoyed the work. It’s hard work, but I’ve enjoyed the people and the places I’ve been. If you do the work and show up every day, the higher-ups will take care of you.”

“We take pride in the jobs we do,” Tony says. “If you don’t do it right, they won’t bring you back. Lots of times, the same people who hired you the first time will hire you again. But not if you do a sloppy job. I’ve always said, ‘Do the work like you own the company yourself.’” 

“There’s been a Robinson here since 1940,” Tony says. “I’ve been a part of T. A. Loving since I was eight or nine years old. The Equipment Division used to be open on Saturdays, and I’d come with my dad when he came to get his oil changed. I loved seeing the bee hives that Jack Ledford kept.”