We started PKM Contractors in Dennis, Massachusetts, in 1993 with one truck, one trailer, and Patrick K. McDowell’s determination to make a living in construction. Around Cape Cod, plenty of people know our president as Pat or Bubba. Today we handle excavation, septic systems, utilities, and site work, but our beginning was much smaller. It was Pat, the equipment he could afford or rent, and the people willing to give a new business a chance.
The work has changed in thirty-three years. Our earliest jobs included residential demolition, septic installations, grading, and small excavation contracts. Later came subdivisions, larger septic systems, commercial properties, and public projects. We still consider those first years an important part of who we are, partly because we remember how much help it took to get established.
To understand how we came to be, we have to go back to the summers before the company existed. Pat grew up in Dennis and was drawn to the large machines he saw working around town. Bobby and Billy Sears, who ran the local excavation and road-building business Sears & Sons, gave him his first real opportunity to learn the trade. He was young, eager to work, and especially interested in the heavy equipment.
That story leads to Hokum Rock Road. The former Dennis Drive-In stood nearby, and Sears & Sons operated from 313 Hokum Rock Road. An aerial photograph taken in 1988 shows the area before it became the home of PKM Contractors. At that point, Pat had already spent several summers working for the Sears brothers. He did not yet own the yard, and he had not started PKM. Both would come later.
From 1985 through 1988, Pat worked with Sears & Sons during his summer breaks. He learned by being on job sites, helping with road construction, septic systems, excavation, and site preparation. Bobby and Billy did not keep him away from the equipment simply because he was young. They trusted him with responsibility, and Pat has spoken about how much that meant to him.
The projects took their crews across the Cape. Among the jobs Pat remembers were roads such as Asack Drive and Billingsgate Drive, site work for the original Cape Cod Potato Chip factory in Barnstable, and commercial contracts carried out for the Davenport company. In 1985, he was also involved in site preparation for the Tony Kent Arena in Dennis. The arena would become important to our company again years later, for reasons that had little to do with that first job.
A young operator sees a job site differently from somebody passing it in a car. There is the sound of an engine starting in the morning, the way a machine moves when it is loaded, and the responsibility of working around other people. Pat liked all of it. He later said that being trusted to handle machinery at that age made him feel like a man. It was the work itself, rather than the idea of owning a company, that first drew him in.
He also completed college, graduating from UMass Dartmouth in 1988 with a bachelor’s degree in marketing. That education and the years at Sears & Sons gave him two different kinds of preparation. One taught him about business; the other taught him what it took to get a job done. He would need both once PKM was under way.
Construction slowed on Cape Cod toward the end of the 1980s. In 1989, Pat went to Boston for opportunities in heavy construction, working with union crews and Nicholson Construction on specialized foundation and excavation work associated with the Big Dig era. This was years before PKM Contractors existed. It was part of his own working life, and it exposed him to projects far beyond the residential sites he knew at home.
Pat recalls work connected with the Ted Williams Tunnel as well as drilling and earth-support operations around existing structures. Jobs in a crowded city were different from opening up a lot for a house in Dennis. Crews had to keep the ground stable beside streets, buildings, and other places that could not simply be cleared out of the way.
Much of that work involved tieback anchors: steel tendons installed through retaining walls and secured deep in the ground behind them. The anchors helped support the walls while soil was excavated in front. Pat learned how much planning and drilling happened before anyone could begin digging down to the level they needed.
He came away with a stronger understanding of foundations, retaining systems, and the machinery used to install them. On Cape Cod, he had learned how to move earth and prepare sites. Boston showed him the engineering involved when a deep excavation had to remain stable in the middle of a city.
In 1992, that experience took Pat overseas. He traveled to Turin, Italy, with Billy Sears through a Nicholson collaboration with an Italian construction firm. Pat spent approximately four months working and learning on underground construction at Fiat’s Mirafiori complex. As in Boston, this work belonged to Pat’s career before PKM, not to projects undertaken by our company.
The part of the Italian job that has stayed with him is the way the crews built the underground walls. Hydromills excavated narrow trenches that were used to form deep reinforced-concrete slurry walls. Pat remembers walls reaching roughly 200 feet and horizontal tieback anchors that helped secure them as the site was excavated. The walls were installed before the ground inside them was removed.
For Pat, that sequence made a lasting impression. The strength of a tunnel or underground structure depended on work that would eventually be buried and hidden. It was precise, difficult construction, with methods and machines very different from the ones he first used on the Cape.
By the time he returned to Dennis, he had worked with local excavators, helped on Boston foundation projects, and seen deep underground construction in Italy. In 1993, with business on the Cape beginning to pick up, he decided to start a company of his own.
Our company was established in 1993 and named PKM Contractors in honor of Pat’s mother, Patricia Kenney McDowell. The initials also matched his own, but he has always connected the name to his mother. Family was important to him then, and it remains a part of the story we tell about our beginnings.
The first truck and trailer were enough to begin looking for work, not enough to take on every job without help. Pat rented excavators and other machinery as he needed them, often from Robert Childs in South Dennis. He later purchased a 1992 Case 590 backhoe from Childs. Our early trucks included a 1985 GMC General ten-wheeler that Pat still owns today.
Our first job was a house demolition near Route 20 in Wayland, Massachusetts. We had to start somewhere, and not every call in those first months came from the Cape. Back home in Dennis, we picked up residential excavation and septic work, along with jobs for contractors Pat knew from his years with Sears & Sons. Subcontracting, especially around projects associated with Davenport, helped keep work coming in.
There was no large equipment budget. Pat bought machines used, worked on them himself when they broke, and tried to keep enough work booked to meet the payments. He remembers buying only one new truck during the company’s first ten years. The difficulty was not just finding a machine that could do the work; it was paying for it, maintaining it, and making sure it was ready the next morning.
We first operated from 360 Hokum Rock Road, in a building owned by Pat’s parents. Northside Auto Body used one side of the property, while PKM worked from the other. The business had rent to pay before the first engine started each day. For a small company, that arrangement was practical, and it kept us close to the people and contractors we already knew in Dennis.
In March 1994, barely a year after opening, we took on our first major subdivision job in South Dennis. It called for approximately 800 feet of roadway and work associated with fourteen planned homes. The project required far more than making a few cuts in the sand: the site had to be opened, shaped, and prepared for the construction that would follow.
The photograph from that job shows an excavation with steep sandy sides and heavy machinery at work in the distance. It is not a picture of a finished street lined with houses. It shows the part of a development that people rarely see once the roads and homes are complete. At the time, it was an important job for a company still learning how to grow.
Our earliest crews were small. Daniel Argard began working with PKM in 1994, and Peter Ledger joined in 1995. We also relied on subcontractors for some jobs. The work did not stop when an operator climbed down from a machine; there were trucks to repair, equipment to move, and another site to prepare for. Those people helped us through the years when almost everything had to be done with limited resources.
Some of our other early assignments brought us to the Dennis shoreline. The beachfront photographs on this page date to the 1993–1994 period, when our crews were moving and placing fill at a beach house site before a seawall installation. The images show a dump truck working close to the water with the property and the open bay behind it.
It was a different setting from the South Dennis subdivision. On a beachfront lot there was less room to position equipment, and the ground and nearby buildings had to be accounted for while material was delivered and graded. On another day we might be putting in a septic system or working inland. The jobs were different, but each one required us to understand the site before we started moving soil.
We have kept these old pictures because they show the work as it happened. There is equipment in the middle of an unfinished job, sand piled beside a truck, and people standing where the machines were moving. They are ordinary photographs from the workday, which is why they tell the story so well.
One of the coastal photographs shows John Rodday wearing a red cap beside a truck at the Dennis site. His name deserves to be attached to the image. John was there during part of our early history, and he has since passed away.
When we look back at those years, we think about people as much as machines. A photograph may be labeled with a year and the kind of job taking place, but the names matter, too. We want the people who were on our sites to be remembered accurately.
Another image from the same job shows Pat on the worked-over ground with the water behind him. He had spent most of his life on Cape Cod Bay, close enough to the shore that the ocean was part of everyday life. He has always been interested in boating, maritime history, and the places around Dennis that have changed over the years.
His work carried him to Boston and Turin, but he came back to build his company where he grew up. That connection to Cape Cod helps explain why so many of our jobs, friends, and customers have remained close to home.
Our next move was only a short distance up Hokum Rock Road. Sears & Sons closed its operation at 313 Hokum Rock Road in 1995, as Bobby and Billy Sears retired from the business. We began transitioning from our original space at number 360, and in 1996 Pat purchased the former Sears & Sons property. It became the home of PKM Contractors and remains our headquarters today.
For Pat, the address was familiar long before he owned it. He had reported there as a young summer worker, climbed into the Sears brothers’ machines, and learned the trade from people he respected. Now our own equipment would be kept at the same property. It was a change in ownership, but also a continuation of a local working relationship that had started years earlier.
The work did not suddenly become different because we had a permanent yard. One archival photograph shows a young Pat on a residential septic installation in 1994, standing beside a sandy excavation with a backhoe close by. That kind of project was a steady part of our early work and helped us build relationships with homeowners, builders, and other contractors.
From the beginning, we worked on septic system installations, excavation, grading, demolition, and the preparation of sites for homes and businesses. Sometimes it was a short job; sometimes it meant returning to the same property over several stages of construction. We learned which machines were dependable, what conditions to expect in different parts of the Cape, and how to plan a job around the land in front of us.
As the years went on, we were able to accept more substantial work without leaving the residential jobs behind. That combination of large and small projects became part of how PKM operated.
A photograph from the 1990s shows a house being taken down with a Komatsu excavator while several people watch nearby. Machines like that carried much of our early workload. Pat remembers the older equipment for the hours it worked and for how much of its maintenance could be handled in our own shop.
He still has strong opinions about those machines. Pat believes equipment built in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s was often easier to maintain than newer models. He has kept older loaders and trucks running for decades, though doing so has meant plenty of repairs and long days around the shop. From his point of view, a machine that can be fixed and returned to work is often worth holding on to.
The equipment wasn't the whole business, but it shaped what we could take on. In those early years, if a backhoe was broken, there was not necessarily another one waiting beside it. We worked with what we had and tried to keep it running.
One of our photographs catches a Komatsu excavator on a trailer, between jobs. Pat can still talk through where he found individual machines, which ones held up well, and what it took to keep them moving. He still owns the 1985 GMC General ten-wheeler from the early years, along with a 1984 International Harvester loader he acquired from Bobby Sears.
Those machines are reminders of the way PKM started. We have worked with different equipment over the years, but the habit of understanding and looking after a machine goes back to Pat’s first summers with Sears & Sons.
Our work expanded beyond the small jobs that got us started. Between roughly 2000 and 2003, we worked on a particularly large septic installation off Route 3A in Scituate, a project Pat remembers as Dr. Hills. He counts it among the most demanding septic projects of his career. We also took on substantial Title V installations and commercial site work across Cape Cod and southeastern Massachusetts.
Other projects Pat remembers include work at Thirwood Place in Yarmouth, the Orleans and Truro town halls, the Marstons Mills fire station, and commercial properties such as the CVS site in Harwich Port. The range of assignments grew, but we continued to do the everyday excavation and septic jobs that were part of PKM from the start.
One later job Pat talks about is the Cumberland Farms property in Wellfleet. He recalls our work there being completed ahead of schedule in early 2020, just before the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted daily life. In the following months, people on the Outer Cape depended on the businesses that remained open. Pat remembers how important that store became to the surrounding community during that period.
Through all of these years, Pat has been proud of getting jobs finished, even when a project did not go the way anyone expected. Construction rarely unfolds exactly as planned. Equipment breaks, weather changes, and unexpected conditions turn up in the ground. He regards seeing the work through as one of the responsibilities that has stayed with him from the company's beginning.
Our connection to Dennis has never been limited to paying jobs. We have supported youth sports and local organizations, and have contributed work and equipment when we could. Tony Kent Arena is a particular point of pride: Pat worked on its site as a young man with Sears & Sons, and PKM later helped with improvements and other needs there. Our local work has also included the soccer fields at Johnny Kelley Park and support for school athletic facilities.
Pat also remembers years of support for the MSPCA, including work associated with its Route 28 facilities, along with involvement in events such as the Seaside Le Mans fundraiser in Mashpee and support for Dennis-Yarmouth student athletics. We mention those efforts because they are part of the company's life in the community, not because we believe every contribution needs a headline.
Outside construction, Pat has always been interested in Cape Cod history, the ocean, travel, and his family. His mother, Patricia, raised boxer dogs, and one family dog named Jock became part of a story about Pat earning a dog-obedience certification. He also speaks often about his children, Taylor and Patrick, and about what he hopes the next generation will remember of the family and the business.
Looking ahead, we want to be part of the next phase of local infrastructure work, particularly sewer connections, underground utilities, and related installation projects as Cape communities expand their systems. We still call 313 Hokum Rock Road home. The old Dennis Drive-In is gone and Sears & Sons has long since closed, but this is the road where Pat first learned the trade. Our company has been here since 1993, and we intend to carry its history forward by doing the work well, giving more than we take, and leaving a place better than we found it.