The company was founded by
James Addison Jones in the 1890s. One of Jones' early landmark projects was the twelve-story
Independence Building, Charlotte's first "skyscraper" and the soon to be first office of J.A. Jones Construction. In 1930, the company won a major contract to build a new military airbase in the
Canal Zone in Panama. During
World War II, the company built 212 cargo ships and tankers and was a substantial builder of
Liberty ships in support of the war effort. It also built
Camp Shelby in Mississippi as well as
K-25 and K-27, production plants for manufacturing
Uranium-235 at the
Clinton Engineer Works at
Oak Ridge, Tennessee. In August 1965, The U.S. Navy
Bureau of Yards and Docks selected J.A. Jones Construction to be a part of the construction consortium,
RMK-BRJ, formed to perform $2 billion in infrastructure construction in Vietnam in support of the
Vietnam War build-up. This contract was closed out in 1972 and the consortium disbanded. In 1979, the company was acquired by
Philipp Holzmann A.G. and under that company's ownership Jones went on to build the 88-story
Petronas Towers, for a while the tallest buildings in the world. However Holzman got into financial difficulties in the late 1990s and this led to the bankruptcy of Jones in 2003 and subsequent sale of Jones' subsidiaries as going concerns. ==References==