Henry Ward Kearns established H. W. Kearns & Co., Ltd. in 1907 to manufacture machine tools, primarily large boring mills. Upon his death in 1927, sons Joseph Richard Carden Kearns and H. W. L. Kearns took over the business. In 1955 the company, which had been privately held, went public. By 1961 they had 480 employees. At some point they became a division of conglomerate Staveley Industries. In 1968, Staveley rationalized its machine tool holdings, with Kearns gaining responsibility for all horizontal boring mills but losing responsibility for their other products such as milling and broaching machines. The H. W. Kearns name survived until at least 1973 but seems to have disappeared in that year or a bit later.
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