Shipbuilding History

Quincy MA

Bethlehem Steel's shipyard in Quincy MA was started by Alexander Graham Bell's famous assistant, Thomas A. Watson, in 1886, as The Fore River Engine Company. It was originally located in East Braintree but soon moved to Quincy and became The Fore River Ship & Engine Company. It was one of the world's great shipbuilders. The company was sold to Bethlehem Steel in 1913 and in World War One operated an emergency facility at Squantum Point to build destroyers. Along with only a handful of other large yards, it remained in full operation between the wars. Its capabilities were expanded at the start of the World War Two emergency, with an injection of $21mm from the Navy. It operated an emergency facility in World War Two as well: this one, at Hingham, built landing craft, DEs and LSTs - see its table here. At its peak, the yard employed 32,000 people. It continued as both a merchant and a naval shipbuilder after the war, with an astonishing record of building tankers for the big Greek shipowners, but couldn't make money, even when Bethlehem's other yards were doing well, and Bethlehem sold it to General Dynamics in 1963. (Note that Bethlehem's last hull number was 1691: GD started again at hull #1, always an unlucky thing to do.) GD invested heavily and concentrated on naval shipbuilding, but they couldn't make money there either: they closed the yard in 1986 and sold the property to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. A start-up company called Massachusetts Heavy Industries bought it in 1997 and partially modernized it, with the aid of Title XI financing rammed down MARAD's throat by the Massachusetts congressional delegation. This company, which had no idea what it was doing, went bankrupt in 1999 before it could complete the modernization and the yard became MARAD's. It was sold at auction in January 2003 to a used-car dealer for $9 million and has now been liquidated.