The American Clyde: Wilmington's Iron Shipbuilding Era
Near Wilmington, Delaware
By the late eighteen sixties, a stretch of the Christina River waterfront that you are passing through had earned the city a remarkable nickname: the American Clyde. The Clyde, in Scotland, was the center of global iron shipbuilding. And in those years, the yards along the Christina River were said to be producing more iron ships than every other shipyard in the United States combined.
The firm that led the charge was Harlan and Hollingsworth, founded in the late eighteen thirties originally as a railroad car manufacturer. The company expanded into iron ship construction in the early eighteen forties, becoming one of the earliest American yards to work in metal rather than wood. A second major player, Pusey and Jones, joined the river in the same era. Together, these two Wilmington yards took advantage of the Delaware River's deep water access and the city's trained metalworking workforce to build vessels for steamship lines, ferry operators, and the United States Navy.
The scale of the operations was staggering for a mid-sized American city. Harlan and Hollingsworth had built seventy-five iron hulls by eighteen sixty. The Civil War drove demand even higher as both naval and commercial shipping expanded rapidly.
The industry carried into the twentieth century. When the Second World War began, shipbuilding surged again on this waterfront. The Dravo Corporation, operating out of the old yards, launched dozens of ships during the war years, including destroyer escorts and the Landing Ship Medium. At the peak, the yard employed about ten thousand five hundred workers.
Bethlehem Steel acquired Harlan and Hollingsworth in nineteen-oh-four and closed the yard in nineteen twenty-six. The industrial waterfront that replaced the sailing trade of the colonial era eventually gave way to the apartments and restaurants you see along the Christina today, leaving almost nothing visible of the era when this small city out-built the whole of the American shipbuilding industry.
