Joshua Hendy was born in Cornwall, England, in 1822. At thirteen, he migrated with two brothers to South Carolina. He married, became a blacksmith in Houston, Texas, and then lost his wife and two children to yellow fever. Grief propelled him around Cape Horn to San Francisco in 1849, where the Gold Rush was reshaping California. Hendy built the state's first redwood lumber mill, the Benicia Sawmill -- the surrounding area is now Hendy Woods State Park. In 1856, he established the Joshua Hendy Iron Works in San Francisco to supply equipment to placer miners. The company became a leading supplier of mining equipment, including stamp mills and hydraulic giants, and its technology was used in constructing the Panama Canal.

World War I gave the Hendy plant its first experience with marine engines -- 11 triple-expansion steam engines for cargo ships. But the Great Depression hit hard, and indifferent management compounded the damage. The company survived by diversifying wildly: it built giant gates and valves for the Hoover and Grand Coulee dams, manufactured crawler tractors, freight car wheel pullers, and even ornate street lamps. Some of those lamps still stand in San Francisco's Chinatown. This willingness to make anything kept the foundry fires burning through the lean years, and when the war came, the Hendy plant had both the infrastructure and the improvisational spirit to scale up.

Moore streamlined production with assembly-line techniques, standardizing parts so that less-skilled workers could perform tasks previously requiring experienced machinists. As orders grew, so did output. The plant's contribution to the Liberty ship program was staggering -- engines for 754 ships, each one a 2,500-horsepower triple-expansion steam engine capable of pushing a 10,000-ton cargo vessel at 11 knots. After the war, the Joshua Hendy Iron Works was absorbed into larger corporations. The site in Sunnyvale eventually became part of Northrop Grumman's marine systems operations. As a quirky footnote, the Big Thunder Mountain Railroad attraction at Walt Disney World features Joshua Hendy mining equipment in its queue. From Gold Rush prospecting tools to the engines that powered America's wartime supply chain, the arc of the Hendy Iron Works traces the industrialization of the American West.