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Trumbull-Nelson’s
old-fashioned values,
adaptability, and desire to be a leader in the
community and industry have made the
company a staple of New England.
By bruce wood
Blink when you drive by and you might just miss the
understated Trumbull-Nelson headquarters on Route
120 in Hanover. But travel just about anywhere else
in and around the greater Connecticut River valley
region of New Hampshire and Vermont and the
Company’s impact is impossible to miss.
Founded by W.H. “Harry” Trumbull in Hanover in 1917
as a builder of fine homes, Trumbull-Nelson has long
since grown into the Upper Valley’s largest general
contractor. The company that today specializes in a
tremendous variety of institutional, commercial, and
industrial construction projects has helped redefine
the region over its 90-year history.
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From Left to Right: W.H. TRUMBULL, DALE
NELSON, DON SMITH, CLINT FULLER, AND
LEONARD UFFORD, SR.
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Just how widespread has T-N’s impact been? Few know
better than Robert “Robbie” Robinson, the one-time
yard foreman who went to work for the company as a
laborer shortly after graduating from high school in
the late 1950s and did everything from digging post
holes and driving trucks to carefully helping move
million-dollar artwork during museum projects before
retiring in 2003 after 43 years on the job.
“Seems like everywhere I go I drive by something
Trumbull’s done,” the Lyme man says proudly, using
the familiar company name so often invoked by those
who came before him. “It makes you feel good to see
all the things we built.”
Trumbull-Nelson’s impact reaches from the U.S. Post
Office in Hanover to the Woodstock Inn. From the
Powerhouse Mall in West Lebanon to the pool at
Storr’s Pond in Hanover. From Dartmouth College’s
Rockefeller Center to the control tower at Lebanon
Airport. From Centerra Market on Route 120 to the
Stratton Mountain Club in Vermont. And the list goes
on.
Trumbull-Nelson's impact has
been felt by people of all ages and backgrounds.
Whether it’s the newborn at Alice Peck Day Memorial
Hospital, the Dartmouth College graduate student at
Sachem Village, or the octagenarian at the Richard
W. Black Community and Senior Center in Hanover,
Trumbull-Nelson’s impact has been felt by people of
all ages and backgrounds.
But it’s not just buildings that bear the
Trumbull-Nelson mark. “We’ve done a little bit of
everything over the years,” Robinson says. “When I
first went to work at Trumbull-Nelson we went up to
Lebanon Airport. If you are going from Lebanon to
West Lebanon and you look up on the hillside at
night there’s a row of red lights up on the hill.
The post holes were all dug by hand. It took two men
one full day to dig a hole. I worked with a man
every day to dig one hole. It usually took a full
day, sometimes more.
“We built retaining walls on Mascoma Lake, some 22
feet high. We dug miles of sewers, and we even dug a
nice-sized bomb shelter at the Rockefeller Mansion
in Woodstock.”
Although Trumbull-Nelson was headquartered on
Lebanon Street in downtown Hanover—across from the
Hopkins Center—when Robinson signed on, it was a
good deal less centralized than it is today.
“We had a storehouse down in Lewiston at the old
railroad station (in Norwich),” Robinson recalled.
“We had Wilder Yard, over in Wilder. We had a big
metal building, Johnson Warehouse, in West Lebanon.
Across from the old Valley News we had a big barn
where we stored stuff. We had stuff stored
everywhere, not like it is now, where it’s all out
in one yard.”
Trumbull-Nelson’s business, like the physical plant,
has changed over the years as it has adopted new
building practices, technologies, and materials, and
adapted to the changing economics and demographics
of the region.
"We look at ways to hire local
people on projects."-Steve Usle
Dartmouth’s Sachem Village project, where T-N
erected 130 units of graduate student housing in 37
modular two-story dwellings, is a prime example of
the kind of cooperative and forward-looking building
practices Trumbull-Nelson has embraced. The project,
finishing up this spring, was expected to result in
a 30-percent reduction of on-site construction time
and significantly less upheaval for those in the
immediate vicinity, points of pride for the company
charged with bringing the buildings on line.
In recent years Trumbull-Nelson has put added
emphasis on the value-engineering aspect of project
management and so-called “green building”
technology—making both the building itself and the
act of building it more environmentally friendly.
Those practices have been a response to the
marketplace, as has been the changing nature of
T-N’s business. “You look back over our history and
you can see the cycles,” says Director of Sales and
Marketing Steve Usle. “There was a time when
institutional was more important. A time when
commercial was more important.
“Right now I’m seeing more of what I’d call
residential, but not single family homes like when
Trumbull-Nelson started. We’re doing more student
housing like Sachem Village and assisted-living
housing like Harvest Hill in Lebanon. What we are
trying to do, for our part, is build up the staff to
a level of sophistication that can handle all of the
larger projects, because that seems to be the
direction we are going right now.”
While the projects have become bigger and more
complicated, Trumbull-Nelson’s goal has remained the
same—professionalism with the personal touch that
makes the customer and the local community happy.
“That’s important to us,” Usle says. “We look at
ways to hire local people on projects. We realize
the more local a project is the better people feel
about what we are doing and it ends up being a
better job. There are opportunities to go beyond our
position as a large employer and to start helping
the community by working with groups in the
community. We recognize we are a community member
and our roots here go deep.”
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