The only major shipbuilder on the West Coast before the Second World War, and the industrial backdrop against which every small wooden yard in this atlas operated.
- Founded
- 1849 by Peter Donahue as Union Brass & Iron Works; pivoted to iron shipbuilding
- Bethlehem
- Bought by Bethlehem Steel in 1906; the Union Iron Works name kept until 1917
- Also acquired
- Risdon Iron Works, 1911; United Engineering Works, Alameda, 1916
- Notable
- The battleship USS Oregon, designed by the company's chief engineer George W. Dickie
- End
- Divested by Bethlehem in 1982, sold to the City of San Francisco for one dollar
- Archive
- Bethlehem Steel Shipbuilding Division, San Francisco records, Online Archive of California; roughly 50,000 plans at SF Maritime
Sourcing notes & unresolved questions
- No institutional relationship — shared ownership, apprenticeship pipeline or subcontracting — between Union Iron Works and the Bay's small wooden yards was established. Labour-history and apprenticeship records, which might show individual shipwrights moving between the two worlds, were not searched.
Wooden Boat Atlas v3.0 · built 30 July 2026 · a project of the Golden Gate Wooden Boat Foundation · licensed CC BY-SA 4.0 · open data · corrections