Born to Build Blog

Life is like central Illinois weather – it changes in the blink of an eye. It did the night of March 12, 2006. 

The O'Shea family's local roots go back to at least 1860, the year Abraham Lincoln was elected president and moved his office to what is now the Old State Capitol to accommodate the droves of people wanting to see him.

The O’Shea family has been building churches longer than it’s had a construction business. According to family lore, Timothy O’Brien, the uncle of O’Shea Builders founder John O’Shea, built Springfield’s first St. Agnes Church and taught John carpentry.

Bud O’Shea, CEO of O’Shea Builders, was drafted into the Army during the Cold War. After basic training in March 1957 in Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri and specialized training in August, Georgia, Bud was shipped out to Stuttgart, Germany.

In between, he got married to his sweetheart, Helene Eddington. “On my first leave, I proposed marriage to her and we were married at Fort Gordon in Augusta, Georgia at an Army chapel,” he says.

O’Shea Builders started when John Timothy O’Shea (O’Shea President Mike O’Shea’s great-grandfather) listed himself as a contractor in the Springfield, Illinois City Directory in 1900.

     His parents, James and Johanna O’Shea, immigrated to the United States in 1852 from Ireland, at the end of its devastating potato famine. About two million Irish fled here to escape hunger and poverty, according to the Library of Congress.