Foundry and machine shop work is the foundation on which John Bouchard & Sons has built an industrial legacy stretching back six generations.
Photos courtesy of JBS unless otherwise noted
Longevity is one thing. Legacy and the annals of history are another level altogether.
Examine the layers of civic and industrial infrastructure across Nashville, the state of Tennessee and the entire Mid-South and you’ll find evidence of John Bouchard & Sons (JBS), the machine shop turned multi-division infrastructure and services company that this fall is celebrating 125 years in business.
“It’s really amazing to think of the people that we’ve had at this company, people with incredible skills and work ethic and talents … a trade and a skill — something that our society is going to always need,” said William D. Morgan, who has served as the company’s president since 2011, in a company press release.
The history goes back further than 1900 to Chicago, where the company’s namesake as early as 1880 was working to develop machinery for meatpacker Armour that enabled the company to process and refrigerate 1,400 hogs per hour, says the company.
(Note to company leaders: JBS employs an official company historian. How well is your team documenting your organization’s history?)
JBS today occupies the same headquarters site it did in the 1950s.
Not to be confused with global protein company JBS Foods, this JBS has nonetheless performed work over the decades for food & beverage companies and many others across the industrial and organizational spectrum, from Starbucks and Coca-Cola Bottling to Churchill Downs, Memphis International Airport, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Vanderbilt University, Redstone Arsenal in Alabama and Eastman Chemical in eastern Tennessee. As far back as 1928, the company history notes, the Tennessean was calling JBS “important to the construction progress of the entire south.”
Among the community activities at JBS have been establishment of Tennessee Girls Ranch and participation alongside companies such as HON in the “Extreme Makeover” rebuilding of Lighthouse Christian School in Nashville after a devastating 500-year flood hit the city in 2010, sending school buildings floating down I-24. One company’s recovery from that flood was chronicled in this 2011 Site Selection story.
Photo courtesy of HON
Known initially for its iron castings and manhole covers (look for the JBS diamond logo near you), the company’s divisions today encompass equipment sales and service (authorized Gardner Denver distributor), iron construction castings, machine services and construction, including full industrial fabrication capabilities and mechanical, electrical, plumbing and fire protection contracting.
And it’s all emanated from the same property on Harrison Street in Nashville that still functions as the company headquarters today, where fifth-generation owner Lisa Bouchard Morgan serves as chair and CEO, her husband William serves as president and their son John Carver Morgan (who goes by “Carver”), after more than three years apprenticing, works with the machine sales and service departments.
“We’re still here because we hold ourselves to high standards,” said Lisa Bouchard Morgan in the anniversary announcement. “Get it right the first time, treat customers as we hope to be treated, tell the truth and be like family to each other. These values organically grew through the mentoring and camaraderie of our great people. The genuine diversity of our capabilities in 10 unique trades evolved to meet customer needs. The agility this brings to our clients is unique.”
A JBS employee performs rooftop HVAC services not far from the same Vanderbilt Hospital building where JBS employees (below) installed mechanical systems 100 years ago.
Asked how the company’s own growth has kept pace with the growth of its customer base, Carver Morgan wrote me in an email last week, “In 2018, we expanded into Elizabethtown, Kentucky, and Evansville, Indiana, opening facilities in both.”
The company currently has 185 employees, with around 158 at two locations in Nashville, 12 in Knoxville, eight in Elizabethtown and seven in Evansville (located in the town of Chandler, just to the east).
Meanwhile, nobody gets to 125 years old by standing still.
“Our Evansville branch expanded to a larger facility last month,” Carver Morgan writes. “Our East Tennessee team intends to relocate to a larger facility within Knoxville sometime in the next year. We are currently evaluating opportunities for another expansion in the Southeast, but we’ll let that remain undisclosed for now.” — Adam Bruns
The history of John Bouchard & Sons includes installations in 1911 at Nashville’s legendary Hermitage Hotel.
Photo courtesy of Hermitage Hotel
