Onyx Corporation

Two very different stories sit side by side here, and a homeowner should know both. The first is the yard work. Onyx Corporation is an Acton outfit that the company says John and Stacey Durkin started in 1980 with a single truck painted onyx black, hauling before it ever dug; it added a Leominster sand and gravel pit in the 1990s, took the current name in 2011, and now counts 46 years in business with the founders' sons, John Jr. and Cale, in day-to-day roles. What people hire them for is big, built landscape — patios, stone walls, drainage, plantings — usually on properties where the whole site is being rebuilt. Houzz puts the typical job between $200,000 and $2 million, which tells you the scale. The people who have hired them are specific about why they came back. A landscape designer wrote in 2019 that Onyx had built more than twenty of her projects and organized every stage from estimating to follow-up. Another 2019 client hired them for all the site work on a house and barn — about 70 weeks of it, finished sooner than expected and to demanding specifications. A homeowner writing in April 2026 was on year ten across two properties. On Google the number is lower: 4.3 across 17 ratings, pulled there by two one-star reviews from 2024. One came from a neighbor of a job site, who described equipment left on their property and more than twenty calls that nobody answered. Then there is the industrial side, and it is the part to ask about directly. In August 2024, news outlets reported that a 67-year-old excavator operator was killed at Onyx's Sterling sand and gravel pit when a rock ledge collapsed onto his machine; the company closed its Acton, Leominster, Westford and Sterling locations for several days and called him a longtime employee and friend. The Telegram & Gazette reported in May 2025 that the company was cited for safety violations tied to that death, with federal investigators describing "open and obvious" hazardous conditions at the site. Separately, an EPA public notice names Onyx Corporation at its Acton address in a proposed administrative penalty assessment under the Clean Water Act. None of that is a homeowner's patio, and none of the customer complaints touch the finished work — the criticism that exists is about conduct around the job rather than the craft. Massachusetts does not require registration of landscaping-only contractors, and BuildZoom records the company's licensing as not required. Worth calling if your project is a full-site build with excavation, stone and drainage in it and you want one company owning all of it. Ask how the Sterling citations were resolved, what the EPA matter concerns, and how they will handle access and equipment on your neighbors' side of the line.