“When I think of Ralph, I think of someone who truly listened, genuinely cared about you and always greeted you with a warm and welcoming smile,” says Joey Gilbert, president and CEO at AGC of Utah.

“That kindness and humility were the foundation of his leadership,” he adds. “Ralph’s impact on Utah’s construction industry was extraordinary, and his service to the AGC of Utah and recognition as a Ryberg Award recipient reflected a lifetime of building with integrity and purpose. He built more than roads and bridges, he built people, trust and a legacy.”

RLW constructed the bobsled and luge track for the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics. Praised by athletes, the track was the “most difficult project” the firm ever completed, Wadsworth said.
Photo courtesy of Ralph L. Wadsworth Construction

Reputation Building

Wadsworth studied structural engineering at the University of Idaho. He married his high school sweetheart, Peggy Kahler, and they raised seven children together. After college, he worked for firms in St. Louis and Salt Lake City before starting his own consulting engineering firm, where he designed landmark projects like the Valley Music Hall in Bountiful, Utah, which features a 115-ft-dia concrete dome roof, and the Washington, D.C., temple for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Wadsworth also started taking on small construction projects alongside his brother, who had his general contracting license. In 1983, Wadsworth sold his engineering firm and made the move to work full time as a general contractor, establishing heavy/civil firm Ralph L. Wadsworth (RLW) Construction in Draper, Utah.

“My dad was always looking for ways to control his own destiny,” says Tod Wadsworth, RLW vice president.

In his autobiography, “Building a Life,” Ralph Wadsworth expressed that desire for more control over his projects. “I decided that the fewer subcontractors I had to put on one of my projects the better. So I started looking for concrete jobs like bridges, culverts and water tanks,” he wrote.

Tod Wadsworth says that drive for control, along with the growing skills and interests among his brothers, helped diversify the parts of a project the company was able to self-perform. “When we would take on more of a project it was usually because of the kids developing a passion for certain things,” he says. “My brother Ty really liked working with cranes and so we moved into doing our own erecting.”

RLW built a reputation for quality bridge construction and other civil engineering projects like piling, shoring and underground utility work as well as geotechnical engineering. In 1999, the firm was tapped to build the bobsled and luge track on a site just outside Park City in preparation for hosting the 2002 Winter Olympics. Wadsworth called it “the most difficult project” the firm had ever done.

“It was a reinforced concrete structure some 2,000 feet long, a constantly curving track. Every foot of the track had a different cross section,” he wrote.

Wadsworth’s sons Nic and Con led the building team and would occasionally have to call for reinforcements.

“Sometimes in the afternoon, during a concrete pour, we would get an emergency call from the guys on the job, and all of us in the office would hurry to the site to rub concrete before it set up. It was a project we were very proud of,” Wadsworth wrote.

RLW also was an early pioneer of accelerated bridge construction, building bridges adjacent to a site and then moving them into place using self-propelled modular transport systems (SPMT). While using the SPMT system helped accelerate the projects, Wadsworth was put off by the cost and again looked for a way to take more control of the process.

“My sons helped improve on this system by building a sliding system,” he wrote. “With a new support structure in place, the new bridge could be pulled with jacks and slid into place using Teflon slides.”

RLW used its sliding technique on more than 40 projects across the region.

Community Building

When it came to philanthropy, Wadsworth preferred to draw on his skills rather than his checkbook.

“He was a doer and was always happy to help, but he felt that [the act of] building, putting in effort, came more from the heart,” Tod says.

Wadsworth donated his services to the city of Draper over the years, designing and building a new center for the Boys and Girls Club, an equestrian center and, most notably, the Bear Canyon pedestrian bridge on one of the city’s popular hiking trails.

Brad Jensen, a project manager with Draper City Parks and Recreation, worked closely with Wadsworth on those and other projects. “The bridge really became a community project as more groups got involved. We never would have been able to do something like that on our own; he made sure it happened,” Jensen says.

In the late 1980s Cal, Ralph’s second eldest son, started his own namesake commercial construction firm that continues today. In 1991, eldest son Guy launched Wadsworth Brothers Construction, a heavy/civil firm operating in five Western states. In 1996, Wadsworth and his son Kip founded Wadsworth Development. Kip continues as president of the company with commercial developments in 11 Western states.

Ralph retired in the mid-2000s, selling ownership of RLW to his sons Con, Tod and Kip. In 2009, the brothers sold the company to Texas-based Sterling Construction and remain in their leadership positions today, continuing their father’s legacy.