Harveys Foundry of Hayle - The Great Cornish Engineers

Walking around the run-down town of Hayle these days, you would never guess that the industrial heart of Cornwall once beat strongest here. Yet in the mid-18th century Hayle boasted perhaps 5000 jobs in industry. The National Explosive Company, the Cornish Copper Company and the docks were all major employers but the greatest of them all was Harveys.

In 1779 Gwinear blacksmith John Harvey started a small works in Hayle to make hand tools and pumps for the mines. Three generations of Harveys built the country's greatest engineering company, employing geniuses like Richard Trevithick to build beam engines, locomotives and packet ships. Beam engines were the company's best known product and included the largest ever built, draining a polder at Cruquis in Holland and still in working order 150 years later. Cornish examples can be seen at Levant Mine and at Taylor's Shaft in Pool. Most remarkable ship that Harveys built was the Cornubia, an iron-built paddle steamer, originally operating as a Bristol packet boat, bought by the Confederacy as an American Civil War blockade runner, captured by the Union and used by them as a blockader of Gulf ports. Harveys final throw was to build 2nd World War landing craft.

Part of Harveys Hammermill & Ropewalk complex

Remains of Harveys in the area known as Foundry in Hayle

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