After 42 years of overseeing the company his father started, Lowell Sherratt Jr., is stepping down as president. Replacing him is Robert Anderson, who has been vice president of finance for 14 years, directing the financial, accounting, human resources and information services.

Sherratt Jr. will remain as board chairman. In addition, his brother, Gerald Sherratt, mayor of Cedar City, recently joined the board.

Anderson, 55, had worked for the national firm of Haskins and Sells, currently known as Deloitte and Touch, and as an internal auditor and director of internal auditing for Browning Arms Co., Thiokol, and then Flying J. Inc., before joining Honeyville.

"We're still assessing our plans for the future," said Anderson. "There certainly will be no pulling back."

Honeyville, with offices in Salt Lake City, a mill near Brigham City, and a distribution plant in Rancho Cucamonga, Calif., ships a variety of specialty grain products and custom mixes around the world. It employees more than 230 workers.

The story of the trek to Utah was relatively unknown until September of 2005, some 16 years after the death of company founder Lowell Sherratt Sr. when The Salt Lake Tribune published a profile of the company.

In 1942, shortly after the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, federal agents began rounding up Japanese Americans living on the West Coast to send them to inland camps. Sherratt, a seed salesman who worked with Japanese American farmers in Southern California, agreed to lead a dozen or so families to an isolated ranch, 30 miles west of Cedar City.

Sherratt, the only Caucasian in the group, sold his home and led a convoy of cars and farm trucks from Los Angeles into Utah - enduring taunts, challenges and one night in a desert cave outside of Las Vegas to ensure their safety.

Feelings against Japanese Americans ran so bitter there were no news reports of the families' time farming vegetables outside Ceder City, said Gerald Sherratt. Town merchants traded with the Japanese Americans under cover of darkness. Eventually, the families dispersed when they could not get enough irrigation water to support a permanent settlement.

In 1951 the elder Sherratt purchased a mill and began processing a variety of foods. When he died in 1989, no mention was made in his obituary of his role in sponsoring the families.

"We didn't think it was extraordinary," said Lowell Sherratt Jr. "It was just something he did for some very fine people."