Just below Napa, on the Napa River, the Basalt Rock Company constructed a shipyard during World War II and in it built more than two dozen small ships for the U.S. Navy.

I know this for a fact because I was a yard employee for two summers before I got drafted into the U.S. Army.

Basalt ships were either salvage tugs, 213 feet long and designed to go to sea and moor next to damaged vessels or smaller harbor mine layers, designed to either lay or sweep mines from harbors or areas close to shore.

Most of the ships got built by workers who had never seen a large ship in their lives, had never been to sea, didn't know starboard from port and thought of the bow of the ship as its front. They were farmers, townspeople, oil workers lately migrated West to escape the Dust Bowl, and kids like me, out of college for summer vacation.

It really didn't matter much. As it turned out, building ships of steel was a lot like putting giant jigsaw puzzles together. You laid out the parts, cut them from big steel plates and welded them together.

(Most farmer-shipyard workers barely knew one end of a welding torch from another either, but they learned.)

Before the war, Basalt Rock Company had never built a ship in its corporate life, and, as it turned out, once the war was over, it was never going to build another one. The shipyard was converted in peacetime to a plant that made large pipe sections for gas and oil pipelines.

In short, the Basalt story was much like that of Henry Kaiser, who had been a cement and gravel hauler until World War II propelled him into building Liberty and Victory ships at such places as Richmond, Calif., and Portland, Ore., and bombers in places like Willow Run.

Unlike Kaiser, however, Basalt built its ships not on ways but in two dry docks carved out of the bank of the Napa River. The river also had to be dredged so it was deep and wide enough for the finished hulls to get to San Francisco Bay, where their outfitting was completed either at Mare Island Naval Shipyard at Vallejo or in Oakland.

The keels of the vessels were laid in the dried out dry docks and the hulls assembled. Then the dry docks were flooded and the hulls were floated out into the river, sent to an outfitting dock to have their engines and superstructures installed, and then sent down the river.

The resulting vessels had odd names, most of them befitting their future lives: the U.S.S Shackle, Diver, Escape, Cable, Chain, Deliver, Safeguard and so on.

And most had brief careers. The earliest to be launched sailed the Pacific, rendering aid to stricken vessels in out-of-the-way places in the South Pacific, weathering typhoons and towing gasoline and fuel oil barges. At least one made it all the way to Japan by the end of the war.

With the coming of peace in 1945, a number went into the mothball fleet near the Martinez Bridge, only to be given renewed life during the Korean War. Eventually they all ended up in the scrap heap, the fate of most all Naval steel ships.

In time the Basalt Rock Company shared the same fate as its ships. The pipe plant was purchased by Dillingham Corp. The sale also included the company's prewar quarry and pumice brick plant across Highway 12. Eventually Dillingham sold this, too, and now not even the Basalt Rock name exists.

Nor are there many Bay Area residents left who remember the days when steel ships and not fine wines were the most important product of the Napa Valley.

For in the days when Basalt was building boats, there weren't many wine grapes grown in the Napa Valley, either. That was because Prohibition, that noble experiment aimed at forbidding all Americans anything alcoholic, had just ended about the time the war began.

During Prohibition the wineries of the Napa Valley, such as there then were, gave way to prune orchards.

It wasn't until after the demise of the shipyard and the increasing popularity of wine that the prune trees were pulled out and the valley turned into the one vast vineyard it is today.

It was sort of a case of beating swords into ploughshares—or, in this case, steel ships into vintages—that have made the valley famous the world over.

So when you're sipping a cabernet at some Napa Valley venue some weekend soon, drink a toast to the men and women who built iron ships in a valley where wooden wine casks now leave a rich aroma for all of us to enjoy.