: Charlestown Navy Yard: Boston National Historical Park Massachusetts by United States National Park Service - Boston Naval Shipyard (Boston Mass.) History; Charlestown Navy Yard (Mass.) History

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Charlestown Navy Yard

Boston National Historical Park Massachusetts

U.S. Department of the Interior Washington, DC

Contents

Part 1 The Making of a Navy 6 Prologue 9 Growth of the Yard 11 The Coming of Iron and Steam 29 The New Navy 45 The Yard Transformed 63 Part 2 Visiting Charlestown Navy Yard 78

Part 1 The Making of a Navy

Prologue

The U.S. government established Charlestown Navy Yard as the newly-formed republic was meeting early challenges to its merchant shipping. In the decade after gaining independence, the young nation kept no standing navy. But continuing raids on U.S. commerce by Barbary pirates and French privateers in the 1790s spurred Congress to authorize the construction of new warships.

Realizing that existing private shipyards were inadequate for the increasingly ambitious shipbuilding program, the Secretary of the Navy established in 1800-1801 six federal yards to build, outfit, repair, and supply naval vessels. These facilities at Portsmouth, N.H.; Boston; New York; Philadelphia; Washington, D.C.; and Norfolk, Va., were the nucleus of the naval shipyard system. Except during the Civil War, they launched most of the Navy's vessels until the advent of steel hulls in the 1880s, when private yards began building them in greater numbers.

As with the first six, later naval shipyards were sometimes created to fill an immediate military need. The War of 1812, for instance, prompted the building of the two Great Lakes yards. The Mound City yard was established during the Civil War, strategically located near the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers to build and repair Union gunboats. Although U.S. naval vessels are today built in private shipyards, four navy yards still actively serve the fleet.

Growth of the Yard

Bainbridge, who at 37 had already seen extensive naval action and been imprisoned by Barbary pirates, wrote soon after becoming commandant in 1812: "No period of my naval life has been more industrious or fatiguing." He was shorthanded and hampered by bad weather, conditions that must have sorely tested the endurance of a man with his temperament: aggressive, volatile, not noted for his patience. When he took command of the Charlestown yard, Bainbridge pressed the Washington bureaucracy to authorize improvements to a facility that suffered, in his words, from "mismanagement and neglect."

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