January 2004

Engineering Firm’s History Spans More Than 100 Years

What kind of damage and casualties would occur if a van filled with explosives detonated outside an airport terminal?

Such a scenario isn’t expected, but it’s a question that employees of Mead & Hunt, a Madison engineering and architectural firm, have pondered in preparing what are called blast reports used to design security systems.

From hydroelectric dams of the early 20th century to Cold War era fallout shelters to assessing the potential of 21st century terrorist attacks, the 103-year-old firm has been involved in many important public projects.

With about 280 employees nationwide and about $31 million in annual revenue, Mead & Hunt, 6501 Watts Road, isn’t Madison’s largest engineering and architectural firm, but it is one of the oldest and offers a wide array of services.  Last year, the company was named one of the 100 fastest growing engineering firms in the nation and one of the 10 best to work for by engineering trade publications.

Although Madison has nearly two dozen engineering firms, competition isn’t as vigorous as it might seem because their specialties vary.

Mary Hirsch of Flad & Associates, 644 Science Drive, said she doesn’t believe Madison has more engineering firms than other cities its size.  She said Flad, which often designs laboratories and other medical buildings, doesn’t compete very often with Mead & Hunt.

Engineers from various firms often socialize with each other and sometimes move from one company to another, said Bruce Kimball, an engineer with Strang, 6411 Mineral Point Road, which designed the Dane County Exhibition Hall as well as the UW-Madison veterinary diagnostics laboratory.

“We have our bread and butter markets but we typically will end up interviewing against each other at one time or another,” he said.

Mead & Hunt has the largest historic preservation staff of any firm in the Midwest and signed a three-year contract in 1999 with New York to catalog that state’s highway bridges for potential historic preservation.

Rajan Sheth, President"We are a full-service firm,” said Rajan Sheth, the company’s fifth president. “We do everything our client needs.”

He said Mead & Hunt hopes to double its annual revenue to $60 million by 2009.  The company is employee-owned and about 70 employees own all 50,000 shares of company stock. Employees also make up the board of directors with one advisory member appointed from the outside.

From security to control towers to terminals, airports are a Mead & Hunt specialty. Besides designing many of the smaller airports in Wisconsin, the firm has played an important role in ongoing renovations at the Dane County Regional Airport such as designing a $24 million runway built several years ago.

Sheth said one of Mead & Hunt’s biggest upcoming projects is an expensive and ambitious plan to bring Colorado River water to the Baja California peninsula.

Mead & Hunt has expanded to several cities in recent years by acquiring smaller firms. Besides its Madison headquarters, the company now has offices in Eugene, Ore.; Green Bay; La Crosse; Lansing, Mich.; Milwaukee; Minneapolis; and the California cities of Modesto, Sacramento and Santa Rosa.

Daniel W. Mead, an internationally recognized Chicago expert in hydroelectric engineering, founded the company in 1900. Six years later, Mead leased an office on State Street in Madison and hired Charles Seastone, a Purdue University sanitary engineering professor, to manage it. In 1907, Mead closed the Chicago office and moved the entire business to Madison.

One of the biggest early projects for the fledgling company was designing the water supply plant at the Schlitz brewery in Milwaukee, a project that took two years. Mead also used his expertise to design hydroelectric dams on many Wisconsin and Upper Michigan rivers.

He later was appointed by President Herbert Hoover to serve on a commission that studied the possibility of a dam on the Colorado River that would become the Hoover Dam.

In 1941, Mead reviewed architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s plans for a Madison civic center that in 1997 became Monona Terrace. Of the project, Mead said Wright, “has met unusual conditions in a practical, original, and artistic manner and, in (my) judgment, these plans are worthy of most careful and detailed consideration.”

The same year, Clayton Ward of the firm then known as Mead, Ward & Hunt signed a $100,000 contract with the U.S. military to design Camp McCoy, which was expected to require 55,000 acres of land, house 30,000 men and cost $22.8 million. The firm hired 125 engineers for the project.

After World War II, Mead & Hunt worked on many projects related to agriculture, airports and highways. In 1961, the firm got a contract to inspect fallout shelters in southern Wisconsin to determine whether they met federal standards.

Sheth, 54, had designed about 500 bridges throughout Wisconsin by the time he became company president in 1994. He started with Mead & Hunt in 1977, coming to the United States from India, where he received a civil engineering degree. He received a master’s degree in engineering at UW-Madison. He and his wife, Kashmira, an author of young-adult novels, have two daughters.

Sheth said he’s proud of the fact that no lawsuits have been filed against Mead & Hunt during his decade as president.

“We do make mistakes,” he said. “We just take care of them.”

Marv Balousek
Business Reporter
Wisconsin State Journal