Joe Sawyer, John Brown, Matt Stovall and Paul Darr, from left, stand Thursday, Dec. 8, 2016 in Warehouse Row.What's better than being raised in Chattanooga? It's the decision to call it home and to return there to help improve the outdoor attractiveness of what is already billed as the Scenic City.
A quartet of landscape architects who call Hamilton County home decided to come back to their hometown after college and jobs in Georgia, Mississippi, Knoxville and Memphis. Over the past decade, John Brown, Joe Sawyer, Paul Darr and Matt Stovall have helped reshape Chattanooga with their landscape designs through their work at the engineering firm Barge Waggoner Sumner and Cannon.
The four are among seven engineers in the 20-person Chattanooga office, one of 13 offices across the Mid-South operated by the employee-owned firm that is headquartered in Nashville. Stovall, a 23-year employee with Barge Waggoner, helped open the local office in 2001. He recruited the others to help build the engineering firm and, in the process, helped lead some of Chattanooga's major new developments.
"All of us grew up here and knew the appeal of Chattanooga, and it's been exciting to come back and work in an outdoor-oriented town like Chattanooga," says Brown, a senior landscape architect who joined the firm in 2005 after graduating from the University of Georgia and Auburn University.
Barge Waggoner engineers have worked on such projects as the Summit of Softball Complex, which helped draw the National Softball Association's Eastern World Series to town; and the South Chickamauga Creek Greenway and the Chattanooga Riverwalk, which draw thousands of pedestrians and bikers every year.