By Cecilia Nasmith/Today’s Northumberland
That big party on Telephone Road in Cramahe Township on Friday, June 13, 2025 was a big 50th-anniversary celebration of Dekeyser Excavating.
While the band was playing outside, Ed Dekeyser shared reminiscences with Today’s Northumberland during 50th-anniversary celebrations.
“I am very proud. I have a lot of family behind me,” he said.
The business began with the small loader on the family farm.
“A neighbour would call me – can you come down and take out a stump, can you dig out a rock, can you fill in a wash-out, can you bury my cow? That’s how it started, and it just mushroomed from there.”
Dekeyser arranged to buy the loader from his dad for $7,500, his dad agreeing to be paid when young Ed had the money. He got right to work to get it done.
“I got that loader paid for, so then I bought a dump truck. Things were going pretty good, so I hired a guy and bought another loader and another dump truck, and it just kept rolling.”
“Of course, machines today are a lot bigger. The big switch was when I bought an excavator, and that really opened the company up because you can do so much more work than (with) a tractor. I had a lot of people that were patient and generous, and they hired me time and time again.”
Dekeyser grew up on his parents’ tobacco farm, which they sold to his siblings – at the time, he was too young to sign papers legally, so he missed out. He continued to work with his dad on their 1,500-head cattle herd, but the market dropped out and they lost a good deal of money.
“I said to my dad, ‘I’ve got two kids. I’ve got to get something solid. I have got to make a living.’ And that’s where we made the deal on the loader.”
Dekeyser recalls that date as August 1973, and the loader as being about five years old at the time.
“So many miscellaneous jobs,” he said of the early days.
An important one he went after was site work at the Windermere seniors’ home in Cobourg on King Street East. They didn’t want to give him the job, saying he didn’t have the right machine.
“I proved myself,” he recalled.
“I drove the machine all the way to Cobourg up #2 highway. I said, ‘I’ll work for you for two hours. You tell me what you want, and I’ll do that, and if you don’t like it, you will never see me again.”
“I was there for six weeks.”
It was his first foray into construction work – “different dirt,” as he put it.
Over the years, he acquired what he called “a total fleet,” adding to those first loaders and trucks such powerhouse equipment as massive excavators, graders, bulldozers and rock trucks. At times, he has had as many as 40 employees.
“We are self-sufficient. We have our own shop, we have licensed mechanics, everything else,” he said.
Dekeyser has had a lot of municipal contracts, plowing snow in Alnwick-Haldimand and Cramahe Townships, along with business contracts and as many as 150 driveways – and that’s just the snow-plowing side of the business.
We don’t seem to get that kind of snow anymore, he said, but it’s a fact of life that everything changes.
“You might not do something, but next year you will do three times as much of that same whatever,” he said.
“I’ve got some pretty good guys that do all the layouts for the sewer and water and streets. That’s all crucial because, if it’s off, it’s on your nickel to change it.”
Overwork is nothing new to Dekeyser, and he admits to four crippling back operations. But now he’s reached that time of life where he can pass things along.
Friday’s celebration was almost like a reunion, he said, with people he met years and years ago coming to share the big day. Not being able to share the occasion with the brother he lost last winter was sad, but he took comfort and joy in the fact that his all his other siblings could be with him.
His son Mitch has made a lot of contacts, and among the locals at the anniversary party were people from Trenton, Belleville, Cobourg and Port Hope.
He has 11 grandchildren, and his oldest grandson is also working for the company, “so the beat will go on.
“I’m extremely proud, and now my kids have taken over and I can take a bit of a back seat – not that I am sitting on the porch drinking a cold one. I keep myself busy all the time.”
It’s all the result of what he figures is a lot of hard work and a bit of luck.
“If somebody calls, go take care of him – and I do mean Christmas Day, New Year’s Day, whatever it took.
“A handshake was a big thing. It’s not as big any more because, if people are going to screw you, they’re going to do it, and every once in a while you get fed up. But the majority of the people are super. You can’t change it all on one bad apple.”
He is fully confident people can continue to associate the Dekeyser name with quality.
“It’s right into us to do it right because, if you do it wrong, the second time you pay for it.”
“You can get a bad name a lot quicker than you’re going to get a good name. There’s competition out there, and we try to stay friendly with them. We are all struggling to get the same jobs, especially early in the spring. It’s not a bidding war, but fair to everybody.”
