Company History

Construction Products, Inc. of Tennessee and its founder, Wade Thomson, have played an important role in the development of the infrastructure of West Tennessee, western Kentucky and surrounding states for over 50 years.

In 1959, Thomson began business as the Construction Products Division of John William Steel Works, manufacturing and selling corrugated metal pipe and precast concrete products. Precast concrete bridges and pilings were some of the first products made in what was then a new and innovative market. Later prestressed concrete double tees and monowing tees were added.

It didn’t take long for the company to grow and flourish. In 1961, less than two years after its inception, the company was incorporated by Wade Thomson, Glenn Dillon and Hunt Maddox as Construction Products, Inc. and operated out of a facility in West Jackson, Tennessee until displaced by new highway construction.

Diversification has been the cornerstone of Construction Products throughout its corporate history. The company quickly moved into construction with their first precast-prestressed building, Jackson’s Carroll Paper Company in 1961. A sampling of later buildings include major industry and government projects such as the structural concrete portions of the Quaker Oats and Procter and Gamble facilities in Jackson, Tennessee, CCA Prison in Mason, Tennessee and the Federal Correction Complex in Forrest City, Arkansas. Visit more of our buildings at Prestressed and Precast Building Products.

Concurrently, the company added prestressed highway beams to the precast line-up. Numerous bridge and road construction projects have been completed for both highway and rail use. Some of the spans include numerous interstate bridges, the Mississippi River Bridge approach spans at Caruthersville, Missouri, the Elk River Bridge in Alabama, railway bridges at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Kansas City, Missouri. See a more complete list of highway and rail bridges at Highway, Bridge and Road Construction Products and Railroad Products.

Not surprisingly, the young company outgrew their facilities and moved to a larger property on Ashport Road in Jackson. Over the years, this location has seen the company continue to grow and diversify. With a fifty-year history, the company has flexed and changed with the needs of the construction trade, adding and deleting product lines as appropriate. They added the manufacture of box beams, a ready-mix concrete facility, a concrete pipe plant, a dri-cast concrete pipe plant, precast box culverts, an automatic batch plant, contracting, construction and engineering divisions. Concrete floating boat docks, patented and trademarked as Stress-Dock by the company founder Wade Thomson, were an especially successful addition to the company’s product line. Stress-Dock systems have been built in numerous places including the Baltimore Inner Harbor Marina, Baltimore, Maryland.

Along the way, the company diversified into the asphalt paving business for a number of years and began the successful development of subdivisions, developing over 400 lots. The construction and development division of Construction Products later separated into their own company, Thomson and Thomson Inc., a busy bridge repair and marine construction firm.

Today, Construction Products, Inc. produces a full range of precast and/or prestressed products for the highway, railroad, marina and construction industry trades including prestressed bridge products, prestressed building products, prestressed floating concrete boat docks and many other precast/prestressed products.