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Washington Navy Yard
The land for the Washington Navy Yard (WNY) was purchased under an act of 23 July, 1798, with additional lots being purchased in 1801. According to another source, WNY began its operations in 1800 when Captain Thomas Tingey received orders on 22 January. President John Adams, on 2 October 1799, had authorized the acquisition of the land, but confusion over the best site delayed the actual purchase until 17 March 1800.
The first years saw the Washington navy Yard becom the Navy's largest shipbuilding and shipfitting facility, with twenty-two vessels constructed there, ranging from small 70-foot gunboats to the 246-foot steam frigate Minnesota. USS Constitution came to the yard in 1812 to refit and prepare for combat action.
The war of 1812 saw an increase in productivity at WNY. It completed rebuilding the sloop-of-war Hornet and the lengthening of the small frigate Adams before turning to the construction of the large frigate Columbia and the sloop-of-war Argus.
On 14 August 1814 a substantial British force under Adm. Sir George Cockburn and Maj. Gen. Robert Ross landed at Marlboro on the Patuxent River. On the twenty-fourth they brushed aside a hastily gathered American force at Bladensburg and marched into Washington. When it became clear that WNY could not be defended, Commodore Tingey, with the concurrence of the president and the Secretary of the Navy, ordered it burned. All the stores that could not be evacuated, the unfinished Columbia and Argus, and most of the yard's buildings were consumed in the flames. Only the gate house, commandant's quarters, the home of the second in command, adjoining offices, and the barracks escaped along with a small schooner called Lynx. The yard was rapidly pieced together again after the departure of the British on 29 August, but it never fully regained the stature it formerly had.
In May 1815 the newly established Board of Naval Commissioners pointed out that it was disadvantageous to have the yard as a base and recommended that it be limited to shipbuilding. For the next forty-six years the Washington Navy Yard supported the naval activities in the nation's capital, conducted experiments, and built a few vessels. Physically, the dominant feature of the plnat was the pair of large shiphouses erected in the 1820s to protect the hulls on the ways. Some of the ships being worked on include: ship-of-the-line Columbus, frigates Potomac, Brandywine, and the second Columbia, sloop-of war St. Louis and St. Mary's, the schooners Shark, Grampus, and Experiment, the revenue cutter Andrew Jackson, and the big screw frigate Minnesota.
Just prior to the Civil War, WNY became the first navy yard to construct steam engines for marine vessels. The first of these engines were fitted in the Union, whose hull came from the Norfolk yard. The first complete steamer built at the yard was the Water Witch in 1845. From the ordnance laboratory at WNY, Lt. John A. Dahlgren developed and established in 1847 the Experimental Battery. Two years later Dahlgren produced the first of his revolutionary boat howitzers and also came out with the design for his famous bottle-shaped heavy guns. Since the thickness of metal at any point on the guns was directly related to the stress exerted by the exploding powder, Dahlgren was able to increase the calibre of his guns without adding to their total weight. In 1854 the yard began manufacturing heavy ordnance, almost to the exclusion of everything else. It was the role that would dominate the activities of the yard for nearly a century.
The Civil War again placed the yard into a frontline role. The Commandant of the Yard, Captain Franklin Buchanan, was a Marylander who would later serve as a Confederate rear admiral. Assisted by Dahlgren, he took steps to ensure that the yard was secure against any attack but resigned when ordered to arm a group of Potomac river steamers to keep open that waterway. On 22 April 1861 Commander Dahlgren assumed command of the yard and carried out the instructions. Dahlgren's long attachment to the yard and his role in its development were recognized in 1863 by the naming of the new foundry in his honor and the burial in its wall of the leg lost by his son, Col. Ulric Dahlgren, following the Battle of Gettysburg.
The yard played a small but important role in the activities that followed the assassination of President Lincoln on 15 April 1865. Eight of the conspirators were held on vessels anchored off the yard prior to their trials. It was also the yard that held the body of John Wilkes Booth before it was brought to its place of burial.
After the Civil War Washington yard served as one of the assembly points for surplus vessels. Nearly all of them were sold in two massive auctions at the yard on 20 July and 15 September 1865. In the decade and a half that followed the war, the yard fabricated a handful of engines and undertook a program of reworking some of the old Dahlgren Smmothbores into muzzle-loading rifles. Between 1873 and 1879 the yard constructed its twenty-second and last vessel, the screw sloop Nipsic. It appears that WNY suffered less from the assaults of political patronage during the postwar years than most of the other navy yards. The cause is probably due to the proximity of Capitol Hill.
On 14 April 1886 Secretary of the Navy William E. Chandler designated the yard as the Navy's source of heavy guns. By 1892 the ordnance plant had manufactured guns as large as 13-inch bore and had sent 12,000 shells to the fleet. It employed 989 workers that year. By 1898 the Washington Navy Yard was the largest ordnance factory in the world. During the spring and summer of that year, the yard began a twenty-four-hour production schedule six days a week because of the hostile outbreak with Spain. The short duration of the war meant that none of that wartime production actually reached the front in time. So, the yard returned to peacetime activities in 1899.
The expansion of the Navy under President Theodore Roosevelt brought production back to a twenty-four-hour, three-shift schedule in 1901. In 1902, $100,000 was used to make Street. Then in 1916, a further investment of $300,000 carried the yard another two blocks westward. There was a second expansion during World War I that placed the estern boundary along Eleventh Street, SE; that, and other World War I additions, nearly doubled the area of the yard.
Productivity increased dramatically during WWI. Approximately $7 million in improvements were made, including a new gun shop capable of producing weapons as large as 20-inch, 50-caliber pieces. The new building had cranes of 300-ton capacity and 40-foot lift as well as a shrinking pit 35 by 68 feet and 95 feet deep. At its peak the yard empoyed 9,862 men and women. Along with its industrial activities, WNY continued its training school for gunners.
The yard went through two name changes: one in 1945 to the Naval Gun Factory and the other in 1949 to the Naval Weapons Plant. In July 1962, after the removal of most of the ordnance work, the installation bacame the Washingon Navy Yard Annex. On 1 July 1964 it reverted to its traditional name of Washington Navy Yard. Production of rockets and guns continued at the Gun Factory until 1961 when it became an administrative center for various naval activities in the nation's capital.
WNY houses a variety of activities at present: it serves as headquarters, Naval District Washington, and houses numerous soupportactivities for th efeet and aviation communities. The Navy Museum welcomes visitors to displays of naval art and artifacts which trace the Navy's history from the Revolutionary War to the present day. And in July 1999 Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton (D) signed the Federal Facility Agreement (FFA) between the Navy Yard and EPA. Basically, it is an agreement to work with the EPA in cleaning the Anacostia River and any other sites the yard is responsible for having polluted with various contaminants.
Sources:
- Coletta, Paolo E., Ed. United States Navy and Marine Corps Bases, Domestic. London: Greenwood Press, 1985. Ppgs. 181-187.
- History of the Washington Navy Yard
