Farragut's Island: The First Navy Yard on the Pacific

On September sixteenth, eighteen fifty-four, Commander David Glasgow Farragut stepped ashore on a low, muddy island in the Napa River just north of the Carquinez Strait and looked at what would become the first United States Navy installation on the Pacific Coast. He found one house and a few sheds erected by a shipping company that had run a floating dry dock here before abandoning the venture.

Farragut's instructions were to build a functioning naval yard from the ground up. The strategic logic was clear enough: the United States had taken California from Mexico in eighteen forty-eight, and the Pacific was now an American ocean that needed American naval infrastructure. Vallejo's location, sheltered water, access to San Francisco Bay, proximity to lumber, made it the choice.

He served as commandant from eighteen fifty-four to eighteen fifty-nine and oversaw construction of the facility's first permanent buildings. The first ship built at Mare Island was the USS Saginaw, a side-wheel steamer that slid into the Napa River in March of eighteen fifty-nine. Farragut left before she was commissioned. He would go on to become the first full admiral in United States naval history, famous for his command at Mobile Bay during the Civil War. The quote history assigns to him, 'Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead', belongs to that battle, not to this island. But this island is where his naval career on the Pacific began.

By the time of World War Two, Mare Island had become the primary submarine production facility on the West Coast. At its wartime peak, the yard employed more than forty-eight thousand workers. The flags raised on Mount Suribachi at Iwo Jima were sewn by the women working in Mare Island's sail loft, which in wartime made as many as eighty thousand flags a month.

More than five hundred naval vessels were built here across one hundred forty-two years of continuous operation, from eighteen fifty-four until the yard closed in nineteen ninety-six.