Modjeski and Masters celebrates being one of the oldest bridge engineering firms in the country

In 1893, Grover Cleveland was sworn in as president, replacing Benjamin Harrison. 

Thomas Edison finished construction on the first motion picture studio in West Orange, N.J. 

The first recorded college basketball game occured in Beaver Falls between Geneva College and New Brighton YMCA. 

Brothers Charles and Frank Duryea drove the first gasoline-powered car in America on public roads in Springfield, Massachusetts. 

And, Ralph Modjeski started a bridge engineering company in the Midwest, and two years later, gets his first big assignment: designing the Government Bridge across the Mississippi River, which still stands today.   

In the 1920s, Modjeski joined forces with engineer Frank Masters, creating Modjeski and Masters, one of the world’s leading bridge engineering firms, now headquartered in Mechanicsburg. 

This year marks 130 years in business for the employee-owned company — a significant milestone. Many of its solutions, Modjeski and Masters said, “have led to improved methods of bridge engineering and new standards for the rest of the industry to follow.” 

Over the past 13 decades, Modjeski and Masters is responsible for the design and maintenance of some of the country’s most recognizable bridges. Services include fixed and movable bridge design, inspection and rehabilitation, and all facets of life-cycle maintenance, research and code development. 

Teams from Modjeski and Masters, which operates more than a dozen offices, have completed thousands of projects in more than 25 service areas and five engineering disciplines.  

President and CEO Mike Britt, who began his career at the company as a co-op student while attending Drexel, said Ralph Modjeski designed bridges all over the U.S., from New York to San Francisco. He’s also responsible for the Quebec Bridge in Canada, among many others.   

For the past 50-plus years, Modjeski and Masters has been based in the Harrisburg area. Its current headquarters is at 100 Sterling Parkway, Suite 302, Mechanicsburg, which is the former PHICO Insurance Co. building. 

At 130 years, Modjeski and Masters is one of the oldest bridge engineering firms in the country, Britt said. 

Of more local interest, he said, the business designed the Benjamin Franklin and Walt Whitman bridges in Philadelphia; the M. Harvey Taylor Bridge, a gateway to downtown Harrisburg from the West Shore that opened in 1952; and a combined 10 bridges over the Susquehanna River. 

The Ben Franklin Bridge, which connects the City of Brotherly Love to Camden, N.J., opened in 1926. Still going strong nearly a century later, it was the world’s longest suspension bridge at the time. In 2021, the bridge handled 36 million vehicles in two-way traffic, according to the Delaware River Port Authority. 

And the 4,000-plus-foot-long Harvey Taylor Bridge, of steel girder construction, was the first toll-free bridge to span the Susquehanna in the region. 

Modjeski and Masters’ newest project is the I-74 Mississippi River Bridge connecting the Quad Cities region in Iowa and Illinois, Britt said. It features two basket-handle arch bridges 230 feet over the Mississippi (with main channel spans of 800 feet), the last of which opened to vehicles in December 2021. 

The firm also designed the original Iowa-Illinois Memorial Bridge there back in the 1930s. 

In addition to bridge design, rehabilitation and inspection, Modjeski and Masters – which employs approximately 225 people – does highway interchanges and forensic investigation of bridge incidents, Britt said. 

There are three components to the formula that has allowed the company to thrive after 130 years, Britt said. 

“An unmatched dedication to technical excellence”; being seen as a trusted adviser by clients; and a responsiveness to the needs of employees, he explained, are the secrets to Modjeski and Masters’ success. 

Paula Wolf is a freelance writer