The company started in 1942 as the Oakland Shipbuilding Corporation. Its founders wanted to build a new shipyard in Oakland, but the East Bay waterfront was already packed with wartime industry. A better site opened up in Sausalito, next to the new Marinship yard, on land near the former Northwestern Pacific Railroad repair facility. The partners constructed four shipways and received a contract from the U.S. Army to build steel barges. The president was D. F. Baker, a veteran of Mare Island Naval Shipyard, Brooklyn Navy Yard, and Bremerton Navy Yard. Ernest Collins, the treasurer, had built yachts for years before joining the partnership. Robert Rich, who eventually became president, later sold his shares and joined a dredging company that continued working alongside the yard.

What made Sausalito Shipbuilding remarkable was its structure: it operated as a cooperative, with each worker holding a share in the company. In an era when most shipyards ran on strict hierarchies -- foremen and laborers, management and unions -- this yard gave its workers ownership. Between 1942 and 1945, they delivered 40 barges to the Army. Twelve 110-foot barges of Design 229 shipped in 1942. Seven 130-foot barges and six 120-foot gasoline tank barges followed in 1943. The final batch, fifteen 130-foot barges, rolled out in 1944 and 1945. These were not glamorous vessels. They were workhorses -- flat-bottomed steel platforms designed to carry cargo and fuel to wherever the war needed them.

In 1945, like shipyards across America, Sausalito Shipbuilding closed. The war's end brought a massive surplus of vessels, and the contracts dried up overnight. Stanley G. Morris sold his share to Rich in August 1945, and the cooperative dissolved. But the waterfront it had occupied did not sit empty for long. Over the following decades, the former shipyard site evolved into the Sausalito houseboat community -- one of the most colorful and fiercely independent residential neighborhoods in the Bay Area. Where workers once riveted steel barges together for a global war, artists, eccentrics, and refugees from conventional living anchored floating homes. The transformation was complete: a place built for wartime utility became a symbol of peacetime bohemia.