Shipbuilding History

Baltimore MD

R. M. Spedden started in business around 1880 as a machine shop and boiler manufacturer. In 1883, he began building sets of machinery for shipyards and incorporated as R. M. Spedden & Company. In 1886, Spedden took on a partner and operated as Spedden & McClymount until 1890 when a new partnership, Spedden & Burch, was formed. In 1892, the firm was reorganized again and renamed R. M. Spedden Company. The yard was in the Fells Point neighborhood of Baltimore, at 1707 Thames Street, immediately to the east of South Broadway. In 1897, the company purchased Brusstar Shipbuilding Company, which had gone bankrupt, and incorporated the new enterprise as Spedden Shipbuilding Company. The Brusstar yard was on Boston Street in the Canton district, close enough to the Spedden yard for the two to be worked as one. Spedden died in 1911 and the company was bought by A. W. Gieske. It was sold again in 1925 and reorganized as Spedden Shipbuilding Corporation, the name it held until 1948, when it became Wills-Spedden Shipyard, Inc. Finally, it was sold in 1950 to the Chesapeake Marine Railway Company, which only lasted until 1952. Note that, at this company, what we call hull numbers are really project numbers: the sequence of numbers used for ships is also used for engines and boilers, as a result of which only about a third of the hull numbers listed here involve new vessels built by Spedden. In addition, no original records of this company have been found and, as a result, this list has been built from newspapers, magazines and registers of the relevant period, and many of the hull numbers are speculative.