Most Tacomans have driven over its bridges, watched baseball beneath its beams, or worked inside its buildings without ever hearing its name.

Concrete Technology Corporation, tucked along the Blair Waterway at 1123 Port of Tacoma Road, is marking 75 years in business.

"We're everywhere without our name being everywhere," board member Rebecca Fountain told the Tacoma News Tribune during a July 13, 2026, tour of the facility.

Fountain is the granddaughter of co-founder Arthur "Art" Anderson, a Tacoma native born in 1910 who earned his doctorate in civil engineering from MIT, supervised submarine and destroyer construction during World War II, then came home in 1951 with an idea. He and his brother Thomas "Tom" Anderson wanted to build with prestressed concrete, a technique virtually unknown in the United States at the time. Seattle denied them a building permit because the method wasn't in the code. A Tacoma building inspector let them try anyway.

That gamble made CTC what company history calls the first prestressed concrete manufacturer in the country.

The company started with four employees and a small business loan. Seventy-five years later, it employs more than 200 people across a 30-acre campus with more than 150,000 square feet of enclosed casting beds and a 500-foot-long graving dock that loads finished pieces directly onto barges.

CTC's concrete is in Cheney Stadium, T-Mobile Park, the Seattle Monorail, and what Fountain described as the tallest building in downtown Tacoma: 1201 Pacific Avenue, built in 1970. That same year, the company shipped girders to Florida for Disney World. In 1975, it sent floating concrete to Indonesia for a liquefied petroleum gas barge in the Java Sea.

The work hasn't slowed. CTC is a key supplier on Washington state's $2.83 billion Puget Sound Gateway Project, according to WSDOT. The SR 509 and SR 167 highway program connects Pierce and King counties. Vice president Jim Parkins said the company has contributed girders to dozens of bridges on the project over the past five years, with more than 100 exceeding 200 feet in length. CTC set a national record in 2019 with a 223-foot girder on I-5 and is working toward a 225-foot piece, though no completion date has been announced, Parkins said.

On the factory floor during the July 13 visit, workers in bright vests and hard hats moved beneath towering cranes and stacks of cured concrete. Production starts at 5 a.m. each day. Workers hand-weave intricate patterns of steel rebar into cages, then place them in stressing beds where cables are tensed by a machine that stretches 20 to 30 feet underground. After concrete is poured and the cables cut, each piece cures for more than 12 hours, then sits in a storage yard across the street for four weeks to gain strength.

The pieces being built that morning were headed for the Port of Alaska terminal renovation: 875 precast components in all. CTC is also preparing 440 girders for Honolulu's rapid transit guideway.

Near the entrance, a concrete Möbius strip made by Art and Tom Anderson still sits on display. Fountain gestured toward it during the tour.

"They wanted to show off what concrete could do," she said. "People didn't think you could do that with concrete."

On Friday, August 12, 1983, Washington Governor John Spellman proclaimed the day Arthur and Thomas Anderson Day. Forty-three years later, the family business is still pouring.