Shipbuilding History

Newport News VA

Most recent update: September 8, 2020.

This shipyard started life in 1922, in a corner of the Dodge automobile plant in Detroit, the brainchild of Horace E. Dodge. Two years later, he created the Horace E. Dodge Boat Works in Detroit, and was soon building several hundred boats a year, with Defoe Boat Works as a subcontractor. In 1929, he renamed it the Horace E. Dodge Boat & Plane Company and moved it to a 100-acre site in Newport News VA, which apparently cost over $2 million to develop, and employed 700 workers, producing 40 boats a day. In WWII, they built 27 rescue boats, 25 mooring tugs, 74 landing craft and possibly something else, since there's a gap in the schedule between the mooring tugs and the landing craft. The company built some of the most beautiful launches and runabouts, which are now collector's items. There used to be a great web site at dodgeboats.org but it's disappeared: does anyone know where it went? The yard was located at the southern tip of Newport News, at the foot of Marshall Avenue. See the site - later the Chase Packaging plant - from the air on Google here: it was razed in 2021 and is to be rebuilt as an apartment complex. The table below just summarizes their wartime production.

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