Newport News Shipbuilding: Where America Builds Its Carriers
Near Norfolk Va Beach, Virginia
The shipyard sprawling along the waterfront ahead of you is one of the most consequential industrial facilities in American history. Newport News Shipbuilding has been building warships for the United States Navy for more than a century and a quarter, and it remains the only facility in the country capable of constructing nuclear-powered aircraft carriers.
The yard was founded in eighteen eighty-six by Collis P. Huntington, the railroad magnate who had already built the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad and extended it to the Virginia Peninsula. Huntington saw that the deepwater harbor at Hampton Roads was ideal for heavy shipbuilding, and he incorporated what was then called the Chesapeake Dry Dock and Construction Company. The first vessel delivered was a tugboat named Dorothy.
The Navy came calling quickly. By eighteen ninety-seven the yard had delivered its first three warships: USS Nashville, USS Wilmington, and USS Helena. From that point the relationship between Newport News and the United States Navy deepened into something close to a permanent partnership. The yard built USS Ranger, the first American vessel designed from the keel up as an aircraft carrier, launched in nineteen thirty-three. It built USS Enterprise, the first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, commissioned in nineteen sixty-one.
During World War Two the yard worked around the clock. It built battleships and aircraft carriers while also repairing damaged vessels brought in from the Atlantic and Pacific theaters. The civilian workforce swelled into the tens of thousands. The city of Newport News itself had effectively grown up around the yard and remained inseparable from it.
Today the facility operates as a division of Huntington Ingalls Industries and employs roughly twenty thousand people. The Gerald R. Ford class carriers, the largest warships ever built, come out of this yard. More than eight hundred ships have been delivered from this waterfront since eighteen eighty-six, a record that has no parallel in American shipbuilding history.
