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The story
Industrialist Collis P. Huntington (1821–1900) provided crucial funding to complete the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad (C&O) from Richmond, Virginia, to the Ohio River in the early 1870s. Although originally built for general commerce, this C&O rail link to the Midwest was soon also being used to transport bituminous coal from the previously isolated coalfields, adjacent to the New River and the Kanawha River in West Virginia. In 1881, the Peninsula Extension of the C&O was built from Richmond down the Virginia Peninsula to reach a new coal pier on Hampton Roads in Warwick County near the small unincorporated community of Newport News Point. However, building the railroad and coal pier was only the first part of Huntington's dreams for Newport News.
The shipyard's early years
In 1886, Huntington built a shipyard to repair ships servicing this transportation hub. In 1891, Newport News Shipbuilding and Drydock Company delivered its first ship, the tugboat Dorothy. By 1897, NNS had built three warships for the U.S. Navy: USS Nashville, Wilmington and Helena.
When Collis died in 1900, his nephew Henry E. Huntington inherited much of his uncle's fortune. He also married Collis' widow Arabella Huntington, and assumed Collis' leadership role with Newport News Shipbuilding and Drydock Company. Under Henry Huntington's leadership, growth continued.
In 1906, the revolutionary HMS Dreadnought launched a great naval race worldwide. Between 1907 and 1923, Newport News built six of the U.S. Navy's total of 22 dreadnoughts – USS Delaware, Texas, Pennsylvania, Mississippi, Maryland and West Virginia. All but the first were in active service in World War II. In 1907, President Theodore Roosevelt sent the Great White Fleet on its round-the-world voyage. NNS had built seven of its 16 battleships.
In 1914, NNS built SS Medina for the Mallory Steamship Company; as MV Doulos, she was the world's oldest active ocean-faring passenger ship until 2009.
Newport News and the shipyard
In the early years, leaders of the Newport News community and those of the shipyard were virtually interchangeable. Shipyard president Walter A. Post served from March 9, 1911, to February 12, 1912, when he died. Earlier, he had come to the area as one of the builders of the C&O Railway's terminals, and had served as the first mayor of Newport News after it became an independent city in 1896. It was on March 14, 1914, that Albert Lloyd Hopkins, a young New Yorker trained in engineering, succeeded Post as president of the company. In May 1915, while traveling to England on shipyard business aboard RMS Lusitania, Hopkins died when that ship was torpedoed and sunk by a German U-boat off Queenstown on the Irish coast. His assistant, Frederic Gauntlett, was also on board, but was able to swim to safety. Homer Lenoir Ferguson was company vice president when Hopkins died, and assumed the presidency the following August. He saw the company through both world wars, became a noted community leader, and was a co-founder of the Mariners' Museum with Archer Huntington. He served until July 31, 1946, after World War II had ended on both the European and Pacific fronts.
Just northwest of the shipyard, Hilton Village, one of the first planned communities in the country, was built by the federal government to house shipyard workers in 1918. The planners met with the wives of shipyard workers. Based on their input, 14 house plans were designed for the projected 500 English-village-style homes. After the war, in 1922, Henry Huntington acquired it from the government, and helped facilitate the sale of the homes to shipyard employees and other local residents. Three streets there were named after Post, Hopkins, and Ferguson.
Navy orders during and after World War I
The Lusitania incident was among the events that brought the United States into World War I. Between 1918 and 1920, NNS delivered 25 destroyers, and after the war, it began building aircraft carriers. USS Ranger was delivered in 1934, and NNS went on to build Yorktown and Enterprise.
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In 1917, the year the U.S. entered World War I, the Newport News Shipbuilding & Drydock Company was contracted to build several ships for the U.S. military. In order to fulfill this contract, the company had to hire thousands of employees from across the country. However, a large problem arose: the city of Newport News did not have the housing to support this large influx of its population. This led to the creation of Hilton Village, a neighborhood still found in Newport News, Virginia, today, that was created to house these workers.
Ocean liners
After World War I, NNS completed a major reconditioning and refurbishment of the ocean liner SS Leviathan. Before the war, she had been the German liner Vaterland, but the start of hostilities found her laid up in New York Harbor and she had been seized by the U.S. government in 1917 and converted into a troopship. War duty and age meant that all wiring, plumbing, and interior layouts were stripped and redesigned while her hull was strengthened and her boilers converted from coal to oil while being refurbished. Virtually a new ship emerged from NNS in 1923, and SS Leviathan became the flagship of United States Lines.
In 1927, NNS launched the world's first significant turbo-electric ocean liner: Panama Pacific Line's 17,833 GRT SS California. At the time, she was also the largest merchant ship yet built in the United States, although she was a modest size compared with the biggest European liners of her era. NNS launched California's sister ships Virginia in 1928 and Pennsylvania in 1929. NNS followed them by launching two even larger turbo-electric liners for Dollar Steamship Company: the 21,936 GRT SS President Hoover in 1930, followed by her sister President Coolidge in 1931. SS America was launched in 1939 and entered service with United States Lines shortly before World War II but soon returned to the shipyard for conversion to a troopship, USS West Point.
Navy orders before and during World War II
By 1940, the Navy had ordered a battleship, seven more aircraft carriers and four cruisers. During World War II, NNS built ships as part of the U.S. government's Emergency Shipbuilding Program, and swiftly filled requests for "Liberty ships" that were needed during the war. It founded the North Carolina Shipbuilding Company, an emergency yard on the banks of the Cape Fear River and launched its first Liberty ship before the end of 1941, building 243 ships in all, including 186 Libertys. For its contributions during the war, the Navy awarded the company its "E" pennant for excellence in shipbuilding. NNS ranked 23rd among United States corporations in the value of wartime production contracts.
Post-war era
In the post-war years, NNS built the passenger liner SS United States, which set a transatlantic speed record that still stands today. In 1954, NNS, Westinghouse and the U.S. Navy developed and built a prototype nuclear reactor for a carrier propulsion system. NNS designed USS Enterprise in 1960. In 1959, NNS launched its first nuclear-powered submarine, USS Robert E. Lee.
In April 1966, the yard reached an agreement to address its policy of racial discrimination. Although the area has a large Black population, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission found that only 32 of the almost 2,000 supervisors at the facility were Black. The most recent apprentice class of over 500 had only six Blacks. The shipyard agreed to provide promotions and pay raises to Blacks who had been discriminated against and to provide accelerated promotion to qualified Blacks.
In the 1970s, NNS launched two of the largest tankers ever built in the Western Hemisphere and also constructed three liquefied natural gas carriers – at over 390,000 deadweight tons, the largest ever built in the United States. NNS and Westinghouse Electric Company jointly formed Offshore Power Systems to build floating nuclear power plants for Public Service Electric and Gas Company.
In the 1980s, NNS produced a variety of Navy products, including Nimitz-class nuclear aircraft carriers and Los Angeles-class nuclear attack submarines. Since 1999, the shipyard has only produced warships for the Navy.
Submarine building problems
In 2007, the U.S. Navy found that workers had used the incorrect metal to fuse together pipes and joints on submarines under construction and this could have eventually led to cracking and leaks. In 2009, it was found that bolts and fasteners in weapons-handling systems on four Navy submarines—New Mexico, North Carolina, Missouri, and California—were installed incorrectly, delaying the launching of the boats while the problems were corrected.
Mergers, realignment, and spin-off
In 1968, Newport News merged with Tenneco Corporation. In 1996, Tenneco initiated a spinoff of Newport News into an independent company (Newport News Shipbuilding). In 2001, General Dynamics made a second bid to purchase the company after a failed bid in 1999. Such a merger would have eliminated competition for the production of Virginia-class submarines, which have only been made by Newport News and GD subsidiary Electric Boat. Northrop Grumman matched GD with a similar bid, and following a Department of Justice anti-trust lawsuit to block GD's bid, GD called off their bid. Now as the sole bidder, Northrop Grumman purchased the company for $2.6 billion and renamed it "Northrop Grumman Newport News". This division was merged with Northrop Grumman Ship Systems in 2008 and given the name "Northrop Grumman Shipbuilding". Three years later, the company was spun off as Huntington Ingalls Industries, Inc., which trades under the symbol HII on the New York Stock Exchange.
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From Wikipedia’s article on Newport News Shipbuilding, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4