About Langston Construction Company

Langston Construction Company has been owner-operated for more than five decades, and the way it works today was shaped by the people who built it, one relationship at a time.

The company began in 1969, when Julian Langston opened a small contracting firm in Piedmont, South Carolina, building water and wastewater treatment work for communities across the upstate. For nearly two decades he ran the business himself, and built a reputation for careful work and standing behind it.

In the late 1980s, Julian brought in James Braswell, a Clemson-trained builder who had spent years with construction firms around Greenville. James carried an industrial general contracting book of business into the company, much of it serving the textile manufacturers that defined the regional economy at the time. When Julian retired toward the end of the 1990s, James took sole ownership and broadened Langston Construction Company’s work across industrial and environmental construction, all of it held to the standards of safety, quality, and process he believed a contractor should never compromise.

Jim Roberts joined in 2005 and Evan Sowell in 2006. They found they worked well together, and as James planned his own succession, he offered them the company. The ownership transition began around 2009, in the teeth of a difficult economy. The owners are candid that those years were lean and the staff was small enough that everyone did a little of everything. They were young, treated every opportunity as if it were their last, and built their customer-service standards in exactly those conditions. The foundation James had laid, they built upon rather than replaced. James fully retired in 2018.

Growth came the old-fashioned way, through word of mouth and reputation. Do good work, and clients come back, and they tell their peers. It takes a large group of people to finish a construction project, and Langston Construction Company’s relationships run not only to the owners it serves but to the subcontractors and suppliers who build alongside its own crews. The company still treats every project as the start of the next one.

The move into power and energy was an evolution, not a strategy session. Langston Construction Company never sat in a room deciding to leave one market for another. The industrial work it already did, with its stringent safety requirements and process discipline, transferred naturally to the electric utility market, and by 2013 and 2014 energy and power had become the majority of its volume.