The Encyclopedia of Arkansas History & Culture, an
online resource operated by the Central Arkansas Library System, published
recently a biography of Neal Garver, the founder of this company, which touches
on his early life on the family farm in Iowa, his time at Iowa State University, his arrival in Arkansas, and some of the company’s earliest achievements.
Garver worked in Toledo, Ohio, and as a professor of structural engineering at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, before reporting in June 1918 to Little Rock,
Arkansas, to aid the country’s war effort. He and two engineering
colleagues arrived to supervise the construction of a picric acid plant
southeast of Little Rock, which was to be used to manufacture munitions during
World War I. By the time the war ended that November, before the plant could become
operational, Garver had already decided to stay in Little Rock to help improve the
infrastructure in a state that, at the time, had few engineers.
“Architects were here in sufficient number to design
buildings, but few could design complicated structural features,” Garver wrote
in his unpublished autobiography.
In 1919, as the firm’s lone employee in the Gazette Building
in downtown Little Rock, Garver started what has grown since into a multi-disciplined firm with offices in 10 states and nearly 500 employees.
Read the entire entry here.
