Neal Bryant Garver arrived in Little Rock in 1918 to help provide engineering services for the construction of a munitions plant during World War I. As the State Highway Department’s first bridge engineer, Garver also led the design of more than 2,000 bridges from 1921 to 1950, helping to modernize the state’s roadways by adding river crossings. In 1919, Garver started what became the state’s largest engineering firm, which began by providing structural engineering services for Little Rock High School (later called Little Rock Central High), North Little Rock High School, the Pulaski County Jail and many other structures.
Neal Garver was born on Feb. 17, 1877, in Lee County, Iowa, near the Mississippi River, to the farming family of Eliza Adelaide Clifford Garver and Jacob Garver, a Civil War veteran from Pennsylvania. His interest in engineering was sparked when he helped cut down oak trees to be used as bridge supports. Despite having only an elementary education, he obtained a teacher’s certificate before attending Highland Park College in Des Moines, Iowa. He later gained admittance to Iowa State University in Ames.
Garver married Laura Scott on Dec. 10, 1905; they had a son and two daughters. After graduating with a civil engineering degree in 1905, Garver worked for the American Bridge Co. in Toledo, Ohio, designing and fabricating steel, some of which was used to rebuild San Francisco following the 1906 earthquake. In 1910, he left for what is now the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to teach structural engineering. In 1918, he informed the engineering firm Alvord and Burdick of Chicago that he was available for war work and was assigned the picric acid project in Little Rock. Picric acid is used in making explosives and was needed during World War I.
Garver and two others working on the project arrived in Little Rock on June 18, 1918, according to his unpublished autobiography. They spent their first night at the Marion Hotel before finding temporary rooms at a home on Ninth Street, where Arkansas Children’s Hospital was later built. When the Armistice was signed on Nov. 11, 1918, signaling the end of the war, construction slowed and eventually stopped. Garver resigned from the University of Illinois to prepare a report on the construction of the plant, after which he decided to stay in Arkansas because he saw a need for structural engineers. “Architects were here in sufficient number to design buildings, but few could design complicated structural features,” he wrote in his autobiography.
Garver’s first office was in the Gazette Building on the corner of Third and Louisiana streets, and his first private engineering project was to develop standard bridge plans for the State Highway Department. He also provided structural engineering plans for a type of cotton warehouse that reduced the likelihood of fire. Garver soon moved to the Donaghey Building on Seventh and Main streets when Gov. George Washington Donaghey offered him office space in exchange for engineering work on the building. Later joined by partner W.T. Morrow, Garver provided structural engineering services for Little Rock High School, North Little Rock High School, Dunbar High School, the Pulaski County Jail, the Ben McGehee Hotel, the Gay Building, the 555 Building, the original Immanuel Baptist Church and the Wallace Building; he also did work on the science, agriculture and library buildings at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville.
During the 1930s Morrow left for work in Tennessee, and Garver devoted more of his time to the Highway Department, serving as chief engineer for two years, but mostly as bridge engineer. Until his retirement from the Highway Department in 1950, Garver consulted on bridge expenditures totaling $75 million. His work touched the state’s most significant bridges, including the bridge over the Arkansas River at Dardanelle and the (now Interstate 55) Memphis-Arkansas Bridge over the Mississippi River in West Memphis.
Garver served as president of the Rotary Club of Little Rock and was honored with a doctor of laws degree conferred by UA in 1948. His son, Mark Garver, became Little Rock’s first traffic engineer in 1952 before partnering with his father in 1954. Garver and Garver was incorporated in 1959.
Neal Garver died on April 23, 1969, in Little Rock, and he is buried at Pinecrest Memorial Park in Little Rock. Following his death, the company he founded went on to deliver such Arkansas projects as Interstate 630; Interstate 540 (later renamed Interstate 49), including the Bobby Hopper Tunnel; and the second incarnation of the Broadway Bridge. — Troy Schulte
This story is adapted by Guy Lancaster from the online Encyclopedia of Arkansas, a project of the Central Arkansas Library System. Visit the site at encyclopediaofarkansas.net.
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