The City That . . . . Built the Fleet

The city did not grow a shipyard. The shipyard grew a city.

This is the thirteenth profile in The City That…, a series about American cities that invented an industry, led the world in it, and then watched the center move on. We tell their stories plainly and with affection — what they made, what it cost, and what they still are.

The Founding: A Railroad Has to End Somewhere

Collis Potter Huntington came to the mouth of the James River because a railroad has to end somewhere.

He had pushed the Chesapeake and Ohio east from the coalfields, and coal that never reaches salt water is only rock. He ran the line down to a thin shelf of Virginia land where the James opens into Hampton Roads — deep water, no ice, a straight run to the Atlantic — and in 1881 the first coal went over the pier.

Then he built a dry dock, because the ships hauling his coal broke down and there was nowhere on that coast to mend them. The General Assembly chartered the Chesapeake Dry Dock and Construction Company in January 1886, and the stockholders met that June and put Huntington on the board.

The dock opened in April 1889 by taking in the monitor Puritan. The shipbuilding plant came separately — bought secondhand from a company in Newburgh, New York, shipped down, and erected from July 1889 with five hundred hands working on it. The name changed to Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company by act of the General Assembly in early 1890.

In September 1889 there were 104 names on the payroll, averaging $2.75 a day. Hull number one was a ninety-foot iron tugboat called Dorothy, delivered in 1891.

The town came second. In 1890 Newport News held 4,449 people. Ten years later it held 19,635.

The city did not grow a shipyard.

The shipyard grew a city.

The Height: Two Battleships, One Tide

On the morning of 24 March 1898 the yard launched two battleships. Kearsarge went down the ways at two minutes past ten. Kentucky followed at 11:35. Two capital ships into the same river on the same tide, ninety-three minutes apart.

That was the announcement. What followed was seventy years of it.

The Navy work began in earnest with three gunboats — Nashville, Wilmington, Helena — awarded in December 1893 at $280,000 apiece and signed the following January. After that came the liners America and United States, and the carriers. Newport News built Ranger, Yorktown, Enterprise, and Hornet: four of the seven American fleet carriers that existed when the war began.

In 1960 it put the second Enterprise into the water, the first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier in the world.

Launch days emptied the schools. Thirty thousand people rode special trains to watch the battleship Virginia take the water in 1904. The yard’s horn set the hour for the whole peninsula, and a family might answer it for three generations on the same trade.

By April 1943 more than thirty-one thousand people worked there.

The men came faster than the town could hold them. In January 1918 the United States Shipping Board approved a village on the river and handed construction to its Emergency Fleet Corporation: Hilton Village, English cottage revival, 473 houses and six stores, one of thirty-one developments built under the federal government’s wartime shipyard-housing program. It went up because the shipyard could not house what it was hiring.

And here the yard did something most Southern yards of that era did not do. Under Homer Ferguson it trained Black workers as riveters, machinists, and shipfitters, at base rates equal to white men in the same trades — a fact recorded in the federal government’s own account of shipbuilding labor in the First World War. Black families left sharecropping in Virginia and North Carolina for those wages, and the East End along Chestnut Avenue became one of the more prosperous Black neighborhoods in the South.

Ella Fitzgerald was born in Newport News in April 1917. Pearl Bailey was born there in March 1918. Both arrived in the middle of the largest hiring the city had ever done.

But that is only half of what the yard was.

The Turn: The Last Commercial Hull

In December 1979 the yard delivered a tanker named U.S.T. Pacific. It was the last merchant ship Newport News built for fifteen years.

Nothing marked it. No gate closed and no whistle blew. The yard had more work than it could take — Navy work, nuclear work, carriers and submarines — and merchant construction simply ran out.

Here the record offers more than one explanation, and I do not think they come apart cleanly.

The Construction Differential Subsidy, the federal payment that let American yards bid against foreign ones, ended in the early 1980s. Without it, American yards could not approach a Japanese or Korean price on a large oceangoing hull, and that trade drained out of the country over the following decade. That is the structural account and it is true as far as it goes. Repair work continued. Jones Act construction continued elsewhere. What died was the ability to compete for the world’s merchant tonnage.

But Newport News also chose. Navy contracts ran longer and the yard held facilities no one else in the country had. A company that walks away from a business it is losing money in is behaving sensibly, not tragically.

It went back in 1994 and tried again — nine product tankers, fixed price. It took charges of thirty million dollars, then seventy, then two hundred and seven, announced its withdrawal in March 1998, and delivered its last commercial hull in June 1999. The company’s own filing blamed material and supplier problems, design and scheduling difficulties, and low productivity. Whether that proves the market had become impossible or proves the yard had lost the habit of competing in it, I don’t know. My guess is both, and that the second grew out of the first. Fifteen years of building only what the government orders changes a yard, and the thing it loses does not show up on a balance sheet until it bids fixed price against the world and finds out.

What Was Lost: Six Apprentices Out of Five Hundred and Six

The equal pay Ferguson set in 1917 was real, and it did not become equality.

In 1966 the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission signed a conciliation agreement with Newport News Shipbuilding. The document is a map of the thing it was correcting. The company agreed to classify and assign without racial discrimination, to review the job categories that were predominantly Black and the wage classifications that were depressed, to open transfer and training to Black employees held in segregated departments, and to desegregate the locker rooms and the foundry. In the apprentice school there were six Black apprentices out of five hundred and six.

That is the yard that hired Ella Fitzgerald’s neighbors at equal base pay, forty-nine years on. Both things are true. A place can be better than everywhere around it and still be what it was.

The men on the floor had their own arrangement to contend with. Since 1939 the production and maintenance workers — some nineteen thousand of them — had been represented by the Peninsula Shipbuilders Association, which over time they came to regard as the company’s union rather than their own. In January 1978 they voted it out by 53.6 percent and brought in the United Steelworkers.

The company spent the next year refusing to sign a contract.

On 31 January 1979 more than thirteen thousand workers walked out. The picket lines held through the winter and into the spring. On 13 April, at the Hampton Coliseum, the union voted to suspend the strike and go back on the 23rd — and three days after that vote, with the fight already effectively over, the gate turned into a battlefield. State troopers, injuries in the dozens, arrests. Roughly two of every five workers in that yard were Black, and Local 8888 was the largest local the Steelworkers had.

Eighty-two days, and it was not a victory. The strike was suspended, not settled. The contract did not come until March 1980, and it came out of the labor board and the federal courts rather than off the picket line.

There was a cost nobody was striking over. For decades the yard insulated its steam plants, pipes, and boilers with asbestos, and the men who installed it and tore it out breathed it. The federal courts have the record: a worker whose exposure the company stipulated was enough to cause his mesothelioma; a man with thirty years of daily exposure — a visible white cloud, the record says — and pulmonary asbestosis; a sheet-metal foreman of thirty-nine years, permanently and totally disabled. What no one has published is a study putting a number on it across the whole workforce. The individual cases are documented. The scale is not.

What Remains: The Yard Is Still There

Newport News Shipbuilding is the only place in the United States that builds a nuclear aircraft carrier, and the only one that can refuel one at midlife. It is one of two American yards that build nuclear submarines. Its division payroll runs past twenty-six thousand. The city’s own accounts put roughly twenty-five thousand Huntington Ingalls employees inside the city limits — 28.81 percent of everyone working in Newport News, against 5.76 percent for the next employer on the list, which is the school system. The backlog is about thirty-two and a half billion dollars.

More people worked there in April 1943 than work there now, which tells you less than it seems to. The war ran multiple shifts with methods that have since been automated away. What the comparison does say is that the shipyard is very nearly the size it was at the peak of the largest industrial mobilization in American history, in a city more than four times as populous.

That is the survival. Here is the price of it.

The yard exists because the United States decided it could not afford to let it die.

Substantially all of its revenue is federal. Its customer is also its regulator, its financier, and the guarantor of its demand, and has spent billions in the last decade propping up the shipbuilding industrial base because no market exists to do it. And the yard is running late. The carrier John F. Kennedy was more than four years past the delivery date it was first given. Enterprise, the third of the name, was more than two. The two American submarine yards together turn out roughly one Virginia-class boat a year against a Navy requirement of two. There is no second yard to take up the slack, because there is no longer a commercial industry that could have grown one.

In 2022 American yards delivered five oceangoing ships. Chinese yards delivered more than seventeen hundred.

Two objects sit at that gate. One is a stone with a bronze plaque, placed in 1917, carrying the sentence everyone in Newport News knows — that they would build good ships here, at a profit if they could, at a loss if they must, but always good ships. It is attributed to Huntington, and the company itself says attributed, because in a hundred and twenty-six years nobody has produced a letter or a speech or a line of print from his lifetime in which he said it.

The other is Dorothy. Ninety feet of iron tugboat, hull number one, launched in 1891, sold off and worked up and down the coast for eighty-five years until the company found her and brought her home in 1976. She is shorter than the rudder of the ship being built behind her. Men walk past her at shift change with their coffee and most of them do not look, the way you stop seeing a photograph in your own hallway. She is the difference between the two objects and the whole argument of the place: the creed cannot be proved and the tugboat can.

A yard that builds things for a living settles its claims by producing the object.

The horn still sounds over the peninsula. Down the road the Mariners’ Museum — built by Huntington’s son, who wanted nothing to do with running a shipyard — still charges a dollar to walk in and stand in front of the turret they pulled off the Monitor, so that a welder’s family can see the thing without deciding whether they can afford to.

And on the ways there is always a hull with staging around it and men on the deck in the morning, and out past the point the James runs down to the Roads the way it did when Huntington stood on the bank and priced the ground.

Newport News built the fleet, and that is worth remembering.

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Why Newport News? It is the American city most completely made by a single company, and the only one on this slate whose industry never left — a yard that has put warships into the same river for a hundred and forty years and still holds a monopoly the country cannot do without.

A personal note.

I reported to Newport News Shipbuilding in the spring of 1966 as Electrical and Reactor Control Officer of a fast attack submarine then under construction, USS Ray (SSN 653). She went into the water that summer. We spent the better part of a year building and fitting her out, and I served aboard her afterward as communications officer and then as operations officer.

I have written that story elsewhere. Super Nuke! is an account of what one marvelous crew accomplished aboard the first operational 637-class boat, and it found its way to the top of Amazon’s memoir list. What I want to record here is what the yard did: it built her right.

The submarine force got the best-built boats in the fleet out of Newport News, and the men who built them knew it.

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Charles C. Jett is an author, civic educator, and Professional Certified Coach based in Chicago. A graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy (Class of 1964) and Harvard Business School, he served during the Cold War aboard the nuclear submarine USS Ray (SSN 653), where his tactical innovations helped inspire Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan character. He is the author of six books, including Super Nuke!, hosts four podcasts, and writes across his Critical Skills Blog platform on history, leadership, and the health of the American republic. In his writing he employs AI tools in a limited, supporting role for research, occasional image creation, and editing, while the prose and judgment remain entirely his own. He and his wife, Dr. Nancy Church, live and co-host the Chicago Salons at Water Tower Residences.