Portsmouth Naval Shipyard

The cluster of low, utilitarian buildings and dry docks on Seavey's Island at the mouth of the Piscataqua River represents the oldest continuously operating naval shipyard in the United States. Established on June twelfth, eighteen hundred, during the presidency of John Adams, Portsmouth Naval Shipyard has been building and repairing warships for more than two centuries, through every conflict the nation has fought.

The shipyard sits on the Maine side of the Piscataqua River, though it carries New Hampshire's name, a quirk of geography and history that has fueled periodic boundary disputes between the two states. It was established in the early years of the republic when the young Navy needed both a shipbuilding facility and a base to project power along the northern Atlantic coast.

For much of its first century the yard built wooden fighting ships. But its transformative era began in the First World War, when the shipyard pivoted to submarines. Its first submarine, the L-Eight, was the first submarine ever constructed in a United States Navy yard. In the Second World War, the workforce surged to nearly twenty-five thousand civilian workers, and the yard launched more than seventy submarines during the conflict, at one extraordinary moment launching four in a single day.

The Cold War brought further evolution. In nineteen fifty-three, the experimental submarine USS Albacore, built here and tested in these waters, pioneered the teardrop hull that would define submarine design worldwide. In nineteen fifty-seven, the yard launched the Swordfish, the first nuclear-powered submarine built at Portsmouth. The last submarine constructed here was the Sand Lance, launched in nineteen sixty-nine.

Today the shipyard no longer builds new submarines, but it remains essential to the Navy, overhauling, refueling, and modernizing the nuclear-powered attack submarines of the fleet. After surviving base-closure rounds in nineteen sixty-five and again in two thousand five, Portsmouth Naval Shipyard endures as both an economic anchor for the region and a living piece of American naval history.