Company History

A SAN FRANCISCO COMPANY

History of Sheedy Crane


Sheedy Crane Company History: From a humble beginning to a well-established enterprise. When Joseph D. Sheedy founded Sheedy Drayage Co. in 1925,, its equipment consisted of a single truck and its main work was hauling to and from San Francisco’s docks and railway depots. The company now operates a fleet of more than 100 trucks, trailers, cranes rentals and other heavy-duty lifting and hauling equipment. Sheedy is one of northern California’s leading crane, rigging and heavy hauling contractors. Sheedy Crane provides rigging services for everything from mounting statues to erecting tower cranes and manlifts. Sheedy has extensive warehousing facilities for the transfer of goods and machinery.

Golden Gate Bridge


Over the Sheedy Crane company history, Sheedy’s growth was due primarily to its responsiveness to the economic development of the San Francisco Bay Area. In the late 1920’s, its expanding fleet of trucks carried hay, grain, feed, and hides to local mills, stables, and tanneries. During the 1930s, the company began to specialize in hauling steel and was the principal drayage contractor for the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge. It was in the mid-1930s that Sheedy acquired its first crane; a 15-ton Orton mounted on a Mack chassis.

During World War II, Sheedy began in earnest to develop the hoisting aspect of its business, purchasing a number of cranes with capacities of 15 to 20 tons (the largest available at the time) to service the busy San Francisco shipyards and oil refineries. Growth continued in the postwar years, and Sheedy trucks and cranes became familiar sights in the Bay Area, hauling and hoisting penstocks for hydroelectric plants, steel, pile-driving equipment for new highways, and rail construction of the Bay Area Rapid Transit and San Francisco Metro systems. When the erection of high-rise office buildings began to transform the skyline of downtown San Francisco, Sheedy became a leading crane and trucking contractor for building materials. In it’s company history, Sheedy has since participated in the construction of nearly every major construction project in the city.


Because of its equipment and broad experience, Sheedy Drayage Co. today is distinguished by the ability to perform any hoisting, rigging, or hauling task efficiently and safely. Whether it involves lifting a piano through an apartment window or steel to ironworkers perched on the beam of a high-rise, hauling a famous sloop to an exhibition or a giant turbine over country roads to a mountain geothermal plant. Sheedy’s fleet includes cranes with lift capacities ranging from 10 to 500 tons and platform trailers capable of hauling thousands of tons. The area served by the company extends throughout California – in fact, nationwide for heavy hauling – and Sheedy is continuing to expand its fleet and facilities in response to the region’s economic development, as it has for nearly a century.

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