Knight Foundry, Sutter Creek, California

Other foundries developed in the Mother Lode at about this same time. One of the earliest was D.C. Demarest's Angels Iron Works in Altaville, near Angels Camp. Established in 1854 the foundry continues to operate today as California Electric Steel. It is the oldest operating foundry west of the Mississippi. Other foundries grew up in Sonora, Placerville, Grass Valley, Nevada City and Downieville. Larger foundries and equipment producers such as Joshua Hendy Machine Works, the Union Iron Works and Risdon Iron Works were established in San Francisco.

Samuel N. Knight was born in Brunswick, Maine. He was apprenticed as a ship's carpenter at age 14. Upon completing his journeyman training he left Maine and that trade to work in Florida in a machine shop. In the early 1860s, at the start of the Civil War, Knight returned to the Boston area and shortly thereafter booked sea passage to California aboard the Garibaldi.

He arrived in San Francisco in 1863 after spending five months at sea and eventually made his way to the mines in Calaveras County. He worked as a millwright constructing mine structures and over time moved to Butte City, then Jackson and later to Sutter Creek.

One project he took on for the new county of Amador was the construction of a wooden bridge over Sutter Creek to carry the increasing wagon traffic on the north-south road, now Highway 49.

Knight had been called on to build a number of large – diameter wooden water wheels for the mines of the area, but these proved to be unsatisfactory for California conditions. Knight experimented with high-pressure wheels and eventually patented his design in the early 1870s. Samuel Knight died of pneumonia in 1913 and was buried at Sutter Creek. He left a portion of his estate to his sister in Maine, but a major portion of the foundry operation was left to the employees.

Information, photographs courtesy of the Amador County Archives, The Historical Marker Database, the Chronicling America Database, and the Library of Congress