Tài liệu The_philadephia_navy_yard

THE PHILADELPHIA NAVY YARD A BARRA FOUNDATION BOOK Copyright © 2001 The Barra Foundation All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4011 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Dorwart, Jeffery M. The Philadelphia Navy Yard: from the birth of the U.S. Navy to the nuclear age 1 Jeffery M. Dorwart with Jean K. Wolf. p. cm. "ABarra Foundation book" Includes bibliographical records and index ISBN: 0-8122-3575-4 (alk. paper) 1. Philadelphia Navy Yard-History. 2. Philadelphia (Pa.)-buildings, Title II. Wolf, Jean K. VA70.P5D67 2000 359.7/09748/11--dc21 structures, etc. I. 00-060736 Frontispiece: Panoramic view of League Island Navy Yard, c. 1911. NARAM Designed by Carl Gross CONTENTS Acknowledgments Introduction PART vi 1 ONE SOUTHWARK 1. Origin of a Navy Yard 9 2. Continental Shipyard 21 3. 4. 5. United States Shipyard 32 "Second and the Next Best" Navy Yard Building a Wooden Sail and Steam Navy 6. CivilWar and Two Navy Yards PART LEAGUE 81 TWO ISLAND 7. League Island Navy Yard 101 8. Neutrality and World War 121 9. Between World Wars 10. League Island at War 11. 12. Cold War Navy Yard Culture of Closure Abbreviations Notes 225 Index 259 223 142 166 191 208 48 61 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS C LOSING THE Philadelphia Naval Shipyard marked the final scene in a long history. For 200 years there had been an American navy yard on the Delaware River in Philadelphia. The emotional response to this historic event by so many Delaware Valley residents, civilian and naval, who worked or served at the Philadelphia Navy Yard in the decades before closure reflected an awareness that a part of the region's history had disappeared forever. This realization led to enthusiastic support for researching and writing a history from earliest colonial roots to final deactivation of the Philadelphia Navy Yard. No one proved more supportive than Robert L. McNeil, Jr., president of The Barra Foundation, Inc., an organization dedicated to preserving Philadelphia's cultural, institutional, and historical heritage. Though moving away from book production, McNeil thought it so important to record the complete history of the navy yard that he convinced the Barra Foundation to support one more book in its program of Philadelphia histories. The University of Pennsylvania Press shared McNeil's enthusiasm and agreed to publish this book on the Philadelphia Navy Yard for both scholarly community of naval historians and wider general public who wanted to remember their local navy yard. Fred Cassady, Jr., Technical Information Specialist for Business and Industry of the NAVSEA Shipbuilding Support Office of the Norfolk Naval Shipyard Detachment located in Philadelphia, procured vital documents, site plans, maps, photographs, and descriptions of historic buildings on League Island for this study. Randy Giancaterino, Michael Mally, and the staff of the Public Affairs Office, Philadelphia Naval Shipyard, allowed me access to the historical files and records even as they prepared for closure by boxing the material for transfer to the National Archives and Records Administration, Mid Atlantic Region in Philadelphia. The staff of the Mid Atlantic Archives, including Regional Administrator Robert Plowman, Assistant Director Kellee Blake, Archivist Shawn Aubitz, and Rebecca Warlow helped guide primary researcher Jean K. Wolf through the early navy yard records already deposited at the Archives. At the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Linda Stanley, Laura Beardsley, Dan Rolph, and Max Moeller helped locate the papers of Joshua Humphreys and other rare collections with which to reconstruct the navy yard's earliest years. Bruce Shearer assisted with prompt reproduction of rare images. At the same time, Joseph Benford, head of the Print and Photograph Collection, Free Library of Philadelphia, provided easy access to the collection. Barbara Wright introduced the collection of photographs at the Urban Archives at Temple University, Philadelphia, to Wolf and assistant researcher Christine Taniguchi of the National Park Service. Special thanks must go to Michael Angelo, Librarian at the Independence Seaport Museum and Todd Bauders, photographer of Bauders Biomedical Photography of Lansdowne, Pennsylvania, for locating and photographing many rare and fragile images from the Lenthall Collection of the Franklin Institute, on loan to the Independence Seaport Museum. The photographic staff of the U.S. Naval Institute Annapolis copied images of the Philadelphia Navy yard from their collection, while Jack Green facilitated research and rapid reproduction of photographs from the Naval Historical Center, Washington Navy Yard. I reserve the last and warmest thanks for the home team of my naval history students, colleagues, and former Philadelphia Navy Yard employees, too numerous to recognize individually, with whom I spent hours discussing preparation of this book. My former student Joseph-James Ahern of the Atwater Kent Museum helped organize a day-long symposium at the National Archives on the history of the Philadelphia Navy Yard. The session brought together the last shipyard commander Captain Jon C. Bergner and former staff and employees to discuss recollections and the meaning of the institution to u.s. Navy and Delaware Valley history. Elaine Navarra, Libby Hart, Judy Odom, and the entire staff of the Paul Robeson Library; Rutgers University, Camden, New Jersey, offered constant assistance. Rodney P. Carlisle of Rutgers University and Russell F. Weigley of Temple University offered continual expert advice and support for this project. Loretta Carlisle of the History Department laboriously entered and proofed every chapter of the work on her computer. And last, my special thanks go to the two most important people in making this book possible. Historic Preservation Consultant Jean K. Wolf located and meticulously researched the primary sources, and my wife Nel typed the rough draft and put up with my constant ill temper during the writing of the book. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS VII INTRODUCTION L CALNAVY YARDS made the United States into the world's greatest sea power. From ice-choked New England harbors, down the Atlantic seaboard, around the Gulf of Mexico, and up the Pacific coast, U.S. navy yards maintained and often constructed ships for the fleet. But naval officers who commanded these ships took navy yards for granted. "The fleet is the thing [and] the base exists for the fleet," Captain Wat Tyler Cluverius insisted in 1912. "The reference, then, of all work performed at a navy yard is to the ships-a unit of the fleet." Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, father of the concept of sea power, agreed: "The highest function of a navy yard is to maintain the fleet in efficiency in war, [and] no utility in peace will compensate for the want of this in war."! Naval historians as well often disregarded the navy yard, concentrating on the fighting admirals and ships in combat. Such neglect became more prevalent in the 1960s, when the government began closing navy yards and sending all new ship construction and most repair and conversion work to private shipyards. Gradually, historic U.S. government naval shipyards in New England, New York, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Florida, and California became institutional relics of the American past, to be recalled through official inhouse histories written by enthusiastic advocates eager to promote the unique role of their particular local institution. Some of these histories used their navy yard to illuminate larger organizational, technological, and socioeconomic change over an extended period of time. Most however, were nar- rowly conceived and lacked the careful historical context and analysis necessary to assess institutional change. Such limited perspective dominated inhouse histories of the Philadelphia Navy Yard, an institution that over two hundred years was known variously as the Continental, United States, Southwark, Federal Street, League Island, or Philadelphia Navy Yard, and after 1945 as the Philadelphia Naval Base and Naval Shipyard.2 One of the oldest and most historic American institutions, the Philadelphia Navy Yard received hagiographic treatment as America's first navy yard, original naval shipbuilding facility, and birthplace of the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps. In later years, local histories called it "Uncle Sam's Greatest Navy Yard," and the "finest and most extensive dockyard in the world." These superlatives, while satisfying to regional pride, distorted the historical meaning of the Philadelphia Navy Yard and obscured the larger importance of this evolving national institution that stood for two centuries near the center of some of the most significant changes in American history. In reality, the Philadelphia Navy Yard suffered major limitations as a base to maintain the fleet for naval operations. "The selection of particular sites to serve this end should be governed by this one consideration, of usefulness in war," Captain Mahan announced. But the Philadelphia Navy Yard lay nearly one hundred miles from the Atlantic Ocean, up a Delaware Bay and River that until recently was often closed to navigation by ice during the winter. Shifting sand bars, dangerous shoals, and strong tidal currents annually altered the course of the river. Before the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers dredged a deep ship channel, there were times that no warship with a draft greater then eighteen feet could cross the bar below the Philadelphia Navy Yard. Larger ships built upriver had to be floated over the bar and armed or outfitted below at some other river port. Consequently, generations of naval officers disparaged Philadelphia. "As a home base its lack of strategic 'position' and its distance from the sea up a long narrow channel, puts it out of consideration," contended war planners on the Navy General Board. Mahan thought Philadelphia one of the poorest sites for a navy yard, arguing that New York and Norfolk provided the best location as permanent bases. "Boston, Philadelphia, Charleston, and others may serve for momentary utility, disseminating provision and preparation, but the protection given them as commercial ports will suffice for the inferior use made of them for supplying the fleet."3 Despite such continuing criticism, an American naval shore establishment existed in Philadelphia for well over two centuries, and a U.S. Navy Yard operated on the Delaware River near Philadelphia without interruption from early 1801 until late 1996. During its long history the navy yard evolved from an informal, private craft organization the government rented in the Southwark neighborhood into a large industrial naval manufacturing complex on League Island. This history makes the yard one of the most important institutions with which to understand organizational change in American naval history. From the American Revolution through the creation of a federal government, Philadelphia was the focal point of national institutional growth and thus a laboratory for earliest experiments in forming and building structures of government, including an American naval establishment.4 Philadelphia and surrounding Delaware River communities emerged during the early nineteenth century as the premier region for the design and development of wooden sailing ships and later iron steam-powered warships. The Navy Yard became the nexus of larger technological and organizational change in naval shipbuilding, particularly in the 2 INTRODUCTION application of screw propeller technology to steampowered engines on warships. During the Civil War, Philadelphia stood as the first line of naval defense for the Union after federal naval facilities to the south fell to Confederate forces. Philadelphia built, converted, and outfitted more than one hundred warships during the war, including ironclads. The Navy Yard outgrew its original location in the overcrowded Southwark waterfront district of the city, and in 1876 moved permanently downriver to League Island. At that time, Assistant Secretary of the Navy Gustavus Vasa Fbx predicted that the place would become a leading government naval facility because it could lay up the entire ironclad fleet in a safe and secure freshwater basin. "The whole of League Island, embracing an extent of land that exceeds in area the six navy yards on the Atlantic Coast, will be ample for all the requirements of a naval station at Philadelphia, forever."5 Instead, the naval station on League Island barely survived, even as private industry and shipyards in the surrounding Delaware Valley built most of the iron and steel steam-powered warships for the late nineteenth-century American navy. Several times flood tides put the entire navy yard underwater and destroyed the floating dry dock. Barely fifteen years after the establishment of League Island, a violent wind storm blew down the only covered shipbuilding ways, and the Navy Department prepared to close its yard. Instead, the government spared the muddy island installation and gradually improved it, opening permanent dry docks in 1891 and 1907 and building research and testing facilities for fuel oil burning engines and boilers, propellers, and wireless telegraphy. In 1911, the Navy transferred the Atlantic Marine Corps Advance Base headquarters and school to League Island. During World War I, the Navy Department established shipbuilding ways, a naval aircraft factory, and a submarine base, and started building a third dry dock that promised to make League Island a first-class naval base and shipbuilding yard. "Philadelphia should be always retained as our leading subsidiary base," argued naval war planner John Hood, "and the navy yard there developed along the lines indicated as a build- ing and manufacturing yard, and as a home station for the reserve fleet and auxiliaries and the advance base outfit."6 The Philadelphia Navy Yard constructed few ships during World War I, and soon scrapped two large battle cruisers laid down on the new shipways after the war. Rumors of closure circulated in the postwar era of naval arms limitations and budgetary cutback brought on by the Great Depression, but industrial recovery under the New Deal and naval rearmament for World War II gave Philadelphia its era of greatest importance. The Navy Yard added two 1,OOO-footdry docks and dozens of heavy machine and other industrial shops and manufactured fifty-three warships, including three battleships, two heavy cruisers, and three aircraft carriers. The League Island facility expanded research and development laboratories for turbine engines and boilers, propellers, aircraft, rockets, submarines, and for a moment even the atomic bomb.7 Postwar cutbacks led once again to rumors of closure, but the Cold War revived the yard, particularly during the Korean and Vietnam conflicts. The Philadelphia naval shore establishment became a center for assisting friendly European and Latin American navies, and although the naval aviation factory and material center closed, League Island continued research and development in aviation, including technology for space exploration, electronic warfare, and nuclear propulsion. But Philadelphia stopped building warships in the late 1960s, and the naval shipyard never received a license to assemble or overhaul the nuclear-powered submarines and surface vessels that became the backbone of the Philadelphia Navy Yard Reserve Basin, aerial view, 1919. This view, looking toward the Girard Point grain elevator, shows the role of League Island as a home base for the Reserve Fleet. NARAM. Dry Dock No.1 on League Island was built in 1891. This 1919 view shows the Delaware riverfront piers and industrial buildings of the older section of the Navy Yard. NARAM. Cold War fleet. Gradually a "culture of closure" permeated every aspect of Navy Yard operations in Philadelphia.8 Remarkably, the Philadelphia Navy Yard stayed alive for twenty-five years after its last ship launching in January 1969, displaying a resiliency unparalleled in American institutional history. In 1990, the Commission on Base Closure and Realignment recommended permanent closure, but even then political and legal maneuvering delayed closure and provided hope that once more the Navy Yard might remain active. Last-minute efforts to save the place created false expectations throughout a Delaware 4 INTRODUCTION Valley that had come to view the Philadelphia Navy Yard as a cherished and permanent institution. Consequently, final closure created intense emotional responses and disbelief that the government could so arbitrarily and abruptly close this historic and seemingly indispensable naval shore establishment.9 Many asked why the United States had closed the Philadelphia Navy Yard. But, as the following history demonstrates, the question more appropriately should have been why it had taken so long to do so. The answer lies in tracing the long, complex, and often tumultuous struggle to survive of an important American naval and leading Philadelphia institution. 6 INTRODUCTION PART ONE SOUTHWARK L CATED ON the Delaware River nearly one hundred miles from the open sea, the city of Philadelphia seemed an unlikely place for a navy yard. Founded in 1682 by Quaker entrepreneur William Penn, the Philadelphia river port shunned military and naval developments. Every other colony armed. The New England, Chesapeake Bay, and Carolina colonies constructed small warships for the British Lords of the Admiralty or local colonial governments and converted merchant vessels into heavily armed privateers to attack the commerce of Britain's enemies France and Spain. Virginia maintained a small naval shipyard for the British at Gosport.! But the Quaker peace testimony spoke against such warlike preparation and the Quaker city on the Delaware River ignored maritime defense. Philadelphia, the largest merchant shipbuilding center in British North America, refused to raise a militia, build fortifications, or launch ships-of-war for its own protection. When Spanish and French maritime raiders came up the Delaware Bay to plunder New Castle and threatened the larger Pennsylvania port upriver, a Quaker-dominated assembly opposed construction of guard boats or conversion of privateers. During the French and Indian War (1756-63), Quaker legislators ignored Captain John Sibbald's appeal for armed vessels to protect Philadelphia's maritime trade routes or to raid those of the enemy. With an eye on the counting house as well as the meeting house, Philadelphia Quaker merchants declared that privateers created too much risk with higher insurance rates, prohibitive construction costs in convert- ing merchant vessels, and inflated prices for naval supplies to outfit them. War raised the wage demands of local ship carpenters, chandlers, and common laborers. Worse, privateers could bring reprisals against the merchants' dominant trade position. "The Uncertain Posture of affairs makes Business very Dull," merchant shipowner Thomas Willing explained, "but [I] am in hopes a Peace will take place, & Commerce go on without Interruption. "2 Willing's antiwar sentiment masked the Delaware Valley's mid-eighteenth-century emergence as a center for naval and military business. The South Carolina Commission on Fortifications ordered 1,000 iron cannonballs, guns, and military stores in 1757, "the whole purchased in Philadelphia," and further encouraged Delaware River arms traders. "If you think proper to make the Shipment in a Vessel of Your own, or one belonging to Your friends," the commissioners instructed Philadelphia merchant William Allen, "we will do our utmost to promote the Interest of such Vessel." Allen's friends in the growing local weapons trade included Willing, James Logan, Benjamin Franklin, John Wharton, James Penrose, Joseph Turner, and Robert Morris. They provided British army and colonial militia during the French and Indian War with clothing, boots, supply wagons, gun carriages, and fire locks for muskets. Local mechanics, organized in part by Franklin, forged iron and brass guns, manufactured gunpowder, and assembled flintlocks.3 Meanwhile, Delaware River ship carpenters constructed Philadelphia's first warship. In April 1762 10 CHAPTER 1 master shipwrights James and Thomas Penrose laid the keel for a 24-gun ship on their riverfront landing above Old Swedes Church in the "hamlet of Wicaco" just below the city. Named Hero, this ship became a model for frigates in the first American naval construction program during the Revolutionary War. In December 1775 the Continental Marine Committee (a forerunner of the U.S. Navy Department) authorized construction of two 32-gun and two 24-gun frigates, and "That the 24 Gun Ships be of the Same dimensions as the Hero Privateer built in the City of Philadelphia in the last War."4 Shortly after Hero's launching, Wicaco shipbuilders petitioned the Pennsylvania provincial legislature to rename their neighborhood Southwark after the London shipbuilding region. Wicaco, the oldest community in the Philadelphia area, had been settled by the Swedish several decades before the British led by William Penn founded a port town immediately upriver. The Swedish settlers of Wicaco built a fortified blockhouse around 1669, a log church in 1677, and in 1700 Gloria Dei (Old Swedes) Church. The Swanson family became the largest riverfront landholders, with Christopher Swanson accumulating at least 150 acres of waterfront properties between Old Swedes Church and a landing place to the north. He subdivided his tract among sons-in-law John Parham, Joseph Knowles, and Anthony DucM, the latter a pottery maker and investor in Southwark's shipbuilding and maritime enterprise, and laid out Christian, Queen, and Catharine Streets along their property divisions above the church lands. These rough dirt tracks, extending slightly northwest from riverfront landing places, became sites for America's first naval shipbuilding community.5 The immensely profitable Philadelphia waterfront development delayed exploitation of the Wicaco area. William Penn encouraged maritime enterprise and shipbuilding along his port town's riverfront from Vine Street down to Cedar (later South) Street, the latter providingWicaco's northern boundary. Before 1700 Penn invested in Charles West's Vine Street shipyard and Bartholomew Penrose's shipyard at the foot of Market Street. Both constructed large merchant vessels. Robert Turner's yard near Mulberry (later Arch) Street Landing also "built ships of considerable burthen." By the first decades of the eighteenth century; Philadelphia shipwrights and carpenters had constructed several hundred smaller vessels. Ropewalks, sawpits, and timber yards grew up around shipbuilding sites. Wharves, docks, storehouses and counting houses, brew and malt houses, and inns filled Philadelphia's compact waterfront. Crowding along the riverfront landings prompted Philadelphia shipbuilding and mercantile firms to seek properties south of Cedar Street.6 Philadelphia and Chester County, Pennsylvania, entrepreneurs developed Wicaco during King George's War (1740-48), when Spanish and French privateers on the Delaware threatened Philadelphia. Constant alarms of impending attack sounded, but the Quaker and Proprietary factions failed to raise a defense. Consequently, Provincial Land Office Secretary Richard Peters, civic leader Benjamin Franklin, and militant Quaker James Logan organized voluntary defense associations to arm Philadelphia. They used a lottery to fund the construction of a 13-gun battery on Anthony Atwood's wharf in the city above Cedar Street and a massive 27-gun earth and timber Association Battery in Wicaco. "The grand Battery at Wicacoa below this Town is also nearly finished," Franklin reported in April 1748, "and tis thought will be ready the Beginning of next Week to receive the heavy Cannon borrowed from N. York." Fifty-three years later, the original United States Navy Yard in Philadelphia arose on the exact spot where Franklin had erected this Association Battery.? "Tradesmen for Building and Fitting out a Vessel of Defence" came to the little inlets and river landings between the Association Battery and Old Swedes Church to convert merchant ships into privateers or to build armed vessels. British and German carpenters, blacksmiths, rope and sail makers, and shipwrights left the overcrowded Philadelphia waterfront or migrated from Chester County to settle along the still unpaved Catharine, Queen, and Christian Streets and down the winding lanes (soon called Swanson and Front Streets) that ran north to south along the riverfront. "Southwark is getting ORIGIN OF A NAVY YARD II 12 CHAPTER 1 greatly disfigured by erecting irregular and mean houses," Peters observed, "thereby so marring its beauty that, when [Pennsylvania Proprietor Thomas Penn] shall return, he will lose his usual pretty walk to Wicaco."8 While working folk and craftsmen settled Wicaco's narrow dirt lanes, shipwrights raised tiny wooden ship-launching ways and platforms along the open Southwark waterfront. Warwick Coates and Richard Dennis set up shipways near the foot of Wicaco Lane (later Prime Street) near the Association Battery. Between these ways and Swedes Landing (Christian Street) and Queen Street Landing, above Old Swedes Church, shipwrights Joseph Marsh, Thomas Casdorp, Simon Sherlock, Francis Grice, James Doughty, and the Penroses constructed ship and boat building facilities. Captains Henry Dougherty, Joseph Blewer, John Hazelwood, and John Conyngham settled nearby. These Southwark shipwrights, sea captains, and craftsmen formed the core of America's first naval shore establishment.9 Farther inland, wealthy Philadelphia merchant and iron forge owner Joseph Turner, merchant entrepreneurs Luke and Anthony Morris, and Thomas and Joseph Wharton, who moved to Southwark from the city for political and economic opportunity and bought riverfront properties, built mansion houses in the Wicaco neighborhood. Thomas Wharton observed that by 1762 the district had changed dramatically. "Knowing thy turn to Politicks," he wrote friend and fellow Wicaco investor William Fisher, I "cannot ommitt mentioning that a few days past our Assembly rose, having present the [Governor] with a Law for Payving the Streets, & for Regulating the Southern side of this City and Erecting it into a Borough, called it Southwark."1o In the midst of Southwark's emergence as an important maritime community, Joseph Wharton's nephew John, son of Chester County coroner and saddlemaker John Wharton and Mary Dobbins, invested in a shipbuilding enterprise with shipwright James Penrose, son of shipwright Thomas Penrose the younger and brother-in-law of Southwark shipwright Warwick Coates. Their property transactions revealed how eighteenth-century Philadelphia family and business connections provided the institutional roots for the first American naval shore establishment. With financial backing from Uncles Joseph and Thomas Wharton, Anthony Morris, and the Cedar Street mercantile house of Willing, Morris and Company, John Wharton accumulated Southwark riverfront properties. He purchased a lot adjoining Swanson's son-in-law John Parham's land near Queen Street, cousin James Reynolds's mast yard at the Queen Street Landing, and brother-in-law Joseph Dobbins's shares in the former Joseph Cox estate, which included Casdorp's boat yard'! 1 Wharton's partner James Penrose accumulated waterfront properties below the Penrose family wharves and storehouses on Queen Street and the Joseph and Samuel Wharton wharves and warehouses on the north side of Christian Street. Penrose leased a wharf and stores from uncle Isaac Penrose, a wealthy dry goods merchant, rented Jacob Lewis's lot above Christian that included Simon Sherlock's boatyard, and purchased a three-acre piece of land between Christian and Catharine, part of step-uncle Anthony DucM's original holdings and adjoining uncle Joseph Wharton's landing and docks. Finally, Penrose bought John Lawson's old boatyard between Christian and Queen Streets with an access lane that ran from the Delaware River through Swanson to Front Street.12 The Wharton and Penrose shipbuilding enterprise lay within paces of the future U.S. Navy Yard and was the immediate institutional antecedent for the Philadelphia naval shore establishment during the American Revolution. But it took association with John Wharton's cousin Joshua Humphreys, Jr., to complete the family linkage to an American naval establishment. Business and family connections in the Philadelphia merchant shipbuilding community brought Humphreys to Penrose and Wharton. The Southwark shipbuilders started to construct larger seagoing merchant vessels of up to 300 tons for British and American mercantile interests, particularly the Free Society of Traders and (Society Hill) merchant shipowners Robert Morris, John Nixon, John Maxwell Nesbitt, and Thomas Wharton, Jr.-all inti- ORIGIN OF A NAVY YARD 13