From Pumilite to WestBlock Systems: A History Built in Concrete

The history of WestBlock Systems begins long before the company carried its current name.

Its roots trace back to 1947, when Pumilite Block and Supply Company was formed in Salem, Oregon. The original business was established to supply and promote masonry materials throughout Salem and the central Willamette Valley, with an early emphasis on lightweight concrete block. From its location on Edgewater Street, Pumilite became part of the region’s postwar building-materials industry during a time of strong construction growth.

In the company’s early years, demand was not the problem. Supply was. Cement was rationed and difficult for a new company to obtain, making inventory one of the business’s first major challenges. As material availability improved, Pumilite placed increasing emphasis on sales, promotion, and customer service.

By 1955, Stan Hammer had purchased all shares of the original partnership and became the sole owner. Under his leadership, Pumilite grew through the 1950s and 1960s, expanding its inventory and adding product lines such as lath and plaster materials, concrete specialties, and steel items.

That growth soon extended beyond Salem.

In 1958, Pumilite opened its first branch in Corvallis. The success of that location helped establish a model for future expansion, including local branch management supported by centralized reporting, bookkeeping, financial planning, and operational oversight from Salem. Additional locations followed over the next two decades, including North Salem, Albany, Bend, Tualatin, and Springfield. By the late 1970s, Pumilite had grown into a seven-location masonry and hard-materials business.

The next major chapter came in the 1980s.

High interest rates and a difficult construction economy affected the building-materials industry and influenced the company’s direction. During that period, the Hammer family business made a significant move into manufacturing with the 1984 purchase of the Smithwick and Western Block manufacturing plants in Portland. Smithwick and Western Block were later renamed Westblock Products, marking an important transition from primarily distributing masonry products to producing them.

The manufacturing side of the business continued to develop with the acquisition of land and construction of a new plant in DuPont, Washington. Jim Hammer joined the business in 1984 and later managed the DuPont plant. In 1995, the North Portland, East Portland, and DuPont manufacturing operations entered a joint venture with Pacific Coast Building Products of Sacramento, forming Westblock Pacific, LLC. A packaged concrete manufacturing plant was later added in DuPont in 1997.

Out of that long history spanning distribution, branch operations, masonry supply, and concrete manufacturing, product development emerged.

In 1989 Stonewall became the first product design.  Legal wranglings cemented the status of Stonewall as it gained federal Patent protection in 1991 within, then, a litigious industry. WestBlock Systems became a division  of the family business focused on patented and trademarked concrete retaining wall products. Manufacturers rapidly gravitated toward the WBS product line as its designs carried forward decades of practical industry experience, shaped by the needs of distributors, producers, contractors, and the broader construction market. The 1990’s laid the roots for WBS’s future growth with the addition of GravityStone the product line - Modular and Core – and soon thereafter NurseryStone, and BarrierStone.  With WestBlock Systems growth Jim Hammer shifted full time into WestBlock Systems in 1998.  The next 10 years brought steady growth of product line and Licensees.  The Recession years turned out to be a creative time as the Patented product line doubled in size. 

In 2015, emerging from a bruised market and an enterprising spirit, GradeSolutions was formed as a design-build construction  company. GradeSolutions was built around a vertically aligned model that connected preliminary design, estimating, product supply, and installation through one coordinated approach.

The company utilized WestBlock’s GravityStone Edge retaining wall system, generated preliminary designs and estimates using WestBlock Systems’ retaining wall design software, and partnered with WestBlock Systems licensed manufacturers to help ensure product availability when projects were ready to begin.

GradeSolutions operated as part of the broader WestBlock history until it was sold in 2025. Its ten-year run served as an integrated proof of concept for many of the ideas WestBlock Systems had long promoted to contractors, engineers, and manufacturers.

Through GradeSolutions, those concepts were applied directly in the field: preliminary design and estimating, coordination with licensed manufacturers, use of the GravityStone Edge retaining wall system, and project-specific structural approaches shaped by actual site conditions. The company also highlighted broader shifts within large civil retaining wall construction, where specifier considerations, construction logistics, product availability, and site-driven solutions increasingly had to be evaluated together.

In that way, GradeSolutions became more than a contracting company within the WestBlock story. It demonstrated how a vertically aligned retaining wall model could connect design, production, supply, and installation around the demands of the project itself.

That perspective continues to influence WestBlock Systems today.

What began as a regional masonry supply company has evolved through several distinct chapters: distribution, manufacturing, product development, licensing, software, and design-build contracting. Each chapter added to the company’s understanding of how concrete products are made, sold, designed, installed, and supported in the field.

WestBlock Systems has now entered its third generation of management, continuing the Hammer family’s involvement in the masonry and concrete industries more than seventy-five years after Pumilite was founded.

The company continues to develop new segmental retaining wall and hardscape systems, carrying forward the same practical foundation that shaped its earliest years: adapting to changing markets, expanding into new areas of the industry, and building from experience.

From Pumilite Block and Supply Company in Salem to WestBlock Systems today, the story has been one of steady evolution.

A history built in concrete, and still being built today.