Norfolk Naval Shipyard: America's First

The yard you are passing has been building and repairing warships longer than the United States has existed. The Norfolk Naval Shipyard traces its origins to seventeen sixty-seven, when Andrew Sprowle founded the Gosport Shipyard here. After independence it passed to the new American government and has been in continuous federal naval service ever since.

Its dry dock, first put into service in eighteen thirty-three, operated without interruption for over a hundred and thirty years before modernization in nineteen sixty-five. During the Civil War the shipyard fell briefly into Confederate hands, and it was here that workers salvaged the hulk of the USS Merrimack and rebuilt her as the ironclad CSS Virginia, whose armor plating the stone marker beside you once formed. From wooden frigates to nuclear carriers, nearly every era of American naval power has passed through these gates.