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Photograph by Skye Dunlap
A poster of Westinghouse stands in front of a photo of the old Hendy Iron Works in a display at the Iron Man Museum, located in the old iron works building.
Iron Man keeps metal era alive
By Kelly Wilkinson
While the era of molten iron ended locally in the 1930s, a small group of devoted retirees on Hendy Avenue is determined to preserve the history of Sunnyvale's first industrial operation.
The Iron Man Museum--located in the Joshua Hendy Iron Works building on Hendy Avenue--is a collection of photographs and artifacts that pay homage to the building's varied history.
Joshua Hendy founded the company in San Francisco in 1856, in response to the lack of West Coast mining equipment during the gold rush. The company moved to Sunnyvale in 1906.
"[Hendy] was smart enough to look around and see what was needed," says Marv Bellis, a former Hendy Works employee and museum committee member. "He never had to dig a spoonful of dirt or get dirty to make a living. But he knew it took too long to get equipment from back East."
Hendy's Iron Works made hydraulic hoses, ore baskets, crushers and other mining staples before branching out to decorative items such as the lampposts which still adorn San Francisco streets.
Hendy died before the 1906 earthquake and fire, which leveled his San Francisco plants. His nephews took over the business and searched for a less vulnerable location for the operations. Sunnyvale offered the company 33 prime acres for free.
According to members of the museum's committee, the city wanted to introduce an industry that would complement seasonal orchards and canning work.
"Sunnyvale made them an offer they couldn't refuse--plus [the land] was right next to the train station," Bellis said. "So that made them the first big factory in Santa Clara [County]."
The company received orders from as far away as Russia, the East Indies and Japan, and its success sparked other companies to establish West Coast locations.
Eventually, its production expanded into other fields as well: some of the hydraulic equipment built on what is now Hendy Street was first used to decimate California hillsides in the search for gold and then helped dig the Panama canal. And during both World War I and II, the company built marine engines and parts for cargo vessels.
The original 1906 Sunnyvale plant employed 75 people, according to museum member Jack Perry. That number spiked to almost 12,000 during World War II, a decade before Perry took a job there in 1955. The company eventually built a third of all engines for the massive Liberty ships that hauled cargo during World War II, and the first turbine engines in the Western half of the country. While Sunnyvale's police force consisted of two cops, Hendy's had its own force of almost 50 officers, and its own fire station.
"The thing was we had a very good secret here," Bellis said. "There was never the desire for publicity, so people thought we were a bunch of farmers out here in these red barns."
Perry points out that this boom was part of the big local defense industry--including the giant Lockheed--which was the precursor to the high tech boom.
"Everybody thinks of Silicon Valley as high tech, but we were totally different," he says. "We were very unique here."
A walk through the museum reveals grainy photographs and small replicas of the work that Hendy Ironworks pumped out for so many years. There are metal baskets once used for pouring ore, which now hold plants; a picture of "Rosie the Riveter" from the WWII era; and models of some of the innovative heavy-duty weapons that the company built as part of its defense work. The museum also houses a "nostalgia room"--full of kitchen tools. stoves and appliances from Westinghouse, which bought the company in 1947. The company was subsequently bought by Northrop Grumman Marine Systems in 1996. The museum committee comprises of retired and current employees who say they are compelled to keep the history alive. It is part of their personal history that they see slipping from the city's memory.
"We're here for the heritage," says Edithe Novak, who worked in the company's communications department. "This was our home from the day we started working here, and people don't know about it."
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Sunnyvale, California Since 1994
