Who we are — in Kandice’s words.
Three generations, one set of mountains.
It started with a man and the coalfields. In the 1960s, Wallace Julian Scalf was building coal preparation plants across Eastern Kentucky — the steel-framed tipples and process structures that washed and loaded the coal this region ran on. That’s where the family first put its hands on iron. But it was the next generation that turned a trade into a name.
That man was his son, Wallace Dwayne Scalf — the founder this company really owes itself to. In 1987 he started Modern Construction Inc., and where his father had worked the coalfields, Dwayne built everywhere. He made structural steel erection the family’s craft and took it further than anyone before him: commercial frames, industrial refineries, towers and process equipment, set plumb and bolted to spec on jobs most contractors never get near. He didn’t just keep the family in iron — he set the standard the whole region came to know us by.
And Dwayne saw what came next. Steel erection lives and dies by the crane that sets it, and the more steel he raised, the more iron it took to raise it — until the fleet outgrew the jobs it was bought for. So he opened the doors to it. Modern Crane & Rigging — operated cranes, certified lift plans and heavy rigging — was his doing too, the rental branch of the company he built, there for anyone in these mountains who needs a pick done right.
Everything we are today, we owe to Dwayne. Three generations in, we still answer the phone in Stanville, run an owned fleet to 350 tons and 350 feet, reach past it through a national network when a job calls for more, and hold to the standard he set on every single lift. The cranes change. The colors change. What Dwayne built doesn’t — everyone goes home.
— Kandice Scalf, Modern Crane & Rigging
