What’s in a Name? The Story Behind Soiland Materials

People hear “Soiland” and assume we made it up: soil and land, a tidy name for a company that moves rock and dirt for a living. It’s a good guess. It’s also wrong. Soiland is a real family surname, carried by a small handful of families in the United States, and it belonged to us long before there was a company to name.

The name traces back to a small corner of southwestern Norway, in the Rogaland region. In Norwegian naming tradition, Soiland is a habitational name, tied to a specific farm or plot of land, and it refers to the provenance of the family’s “farmland”. Our Owner, Mark Soiland’s grandparents, were named Soiland and Solbakken, the latter translates to “sunny farm.” They were the first generation of the family born in America, arriving in San Francisco around 1900 to parents who were still fully Norwegian. His grandfather went on to become a soft-spoken craftsman who built cabinets by hand — perhaps a first taste of the family’s instinct for working with material and land.

That instinct didn’t stop there. Marv Soiland, who founded our company in 1962, grew up on a chicken ranch during California’s egg-producing boom, when the North Bay was one of the country’s largest egg-producing regions. He later earned an engineering degree and built his early career installing water, sewer, and storm drain pipelines across the North Bay. This is the kind of infrastructure that, as Mark puts it, functions as a community’s lifeline. That work eventually led him to purchase Stony Point Rock Quarry in Cotati in 1973, the beginning of what would become present-day Soiland Materials.

The pull toward land didn’t end with Marv, either. It shows up across the whole family, generation after generation, in one form or another. Two of Mark’s brothers, Dean and Troy, both owned rock quarries before retiring. His sister Marlene has built a career in land and resource management, real estate, and finance. His sister Monica is CEO of a construction company, building on the land her family has worked for a century. Chicken ranching, cabinetmaking, pipelines, quarries, real estate, construction — different work, same thread.

Here’s the part that’s hard to explain away: the name Soiland doesn’t literally mean soil. Its roots are Norwegian, not English, and the resemblance is a coincidence. And yet, for more than a hundred years in this country, a family called “farm land” has done nothing but work the land — literally, generation after generation, without much discussion of why. Maybe it’s serendipity. Maybe certain families are just drawn to certain work. Either way, we didn’t invent this story for marketing, yet the family history happens to fit the business almost too well.

So, the next time you see the Soiland Materials’ name on a sign on the side of the road or on a truck rolling out of Stony Point Rock Quarry, Soils Plus, Green Recycling Center or Yard & Garden, know that we didn’t come up with a clever brand name. It’s a Norwegian family name, four generations deep in Sonoma County, still run by a real person, a Soiland today.