The Builders · 1945–1949

The hands that built her

Newport News did not begin life as a ship. She began as a workforce — thousands of men and women on the James River who had spent the war years building carriers and cruisers and now laid down the last generation of American heavy cruisers.

A city claims a ship

The name on her stern was the community's own doing. The Navy awarded her construction contract on 8 April 1944; nine days later, on 17 April, the Peninsula Chamber of Commerce opened a petition drive to name the as-yet-unnamed cruiser for the city that would build her. The petition quickly reached some 40,000 signatures; five days after the drive opened, a telegram carried it to Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox — who died within the week, leaving the decision to his successor, James Forrestal. She would be the eighteenth and last cruiser built by the yard, and she would carry the city's name.

The yard

Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company stood — and still stands — on the James River at Newport News, Virginia, where Collis P. Huntington founded it in 1886. It was a company town in every sense: Huntington's land company laid out the city itself, and for four decades after his death the yard was guided by Homer L. Ferguson. At its wartime peak in April 1943 it employed more than 31,000 people and was delivering Essex-class carriers at a pace of one every three months, 46 ships to the Navy over the course of the war. The workforce that built CA-148 had learned its trades in that crucible — women among them, 1,000 already working the mechanical trades by 1943, riveters like Berline Cashwell among them, and the yard's own Bulletin still profiling women crane operators in July 1945 — and in the yard's own Apprentice School, which had been training shipbuilders since 1919 — across its first century it counted more than 10,800 graduates, some 13 percent of the yard's workforce and a majority of its general foremen. The community had once literally been built around the workforce: Hilton Village, opened in 1918 as the nation's first federal war-housing project, was the government's answer to the yard's shipbuilder housing shortage — and its streets still carry the names of shipyard presidents.

By 1945 the war-work tide was running out. When the keel of hull 456 went down on 1 November 1945, the yard was falling back on conversions and repair work; in December 1948 the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond noted a downward trend in Virginia shipyard employment and took hope from the yard's low bid on a $69 million passenger liner — the future SS United States. The men and women who built Newport News worked, in other words, in a yard whose postwar survival hung visibly on the next contract. She was launched on 6 March 1947, sponsored by Mrs. Homer L. Ferguson.

Building a 20,980-ton heavy cruiser was an act of many trades: shipfitters and welders, pipefitters and boilermakers, electricians and insulators. Decades later, the court record of that era documents what those trades worked around: litigation brought by Newport News Shipbuilding employees names asbestos insulation products in use at the yard — pipe and boiler insulation, gaskets and packing, raw asbestos compounds — and area health studies later measured elevated mesothelioma and lung-cancer risk among the tidewater's shipyard workforce, including men hired before 1950. For the documented product, litigation, and workforce evidence behind that context, see the Newport News Shipbuilding evidence record at Asbestos Atlas.

Further reading. For broader background on the shipyard and asbestos exposure, see WikiMesothelioma’s Newport News Shipbuilding overview.

Launching day — a civic holiday

The yard's own christening report records the day the city declared itself proud: the mayor proclaimed "Newport News Cruiser Day," yard employees were given an hour off to watch, aircraft from Langley Field staged a thirty-minute exhibition overhead, and a crowd of some 20,000 townspeople and shipbuilders watched Mrs. Ferguson christen the cruiser — on Homer Ferguson's birthday.

Nickels and dimes

For the commissioning, the community raised $15,000 for a silver service. The City Council decided that "each citizen should have some part in the purchase": envelopes went out across the city and into the high schools, and came back holding nickels, dimes, and quarters; the jeweler sold the service at cost and the manufacturer forewent his profit. Mayor R. Cowles Taylor presented it to the ship at the commissioning ceremony, 29 January 1949, before more than 800 crewmen manning her decks. The schoolchildren's silver stayed aboard her for all twenty-six years of her service — its later voyage is told on The Keepers.

Douglas T. Locke, industrial electrician

One of the hands who built this hull is named in the law books. The record of Locke v. Johns-Manville Corp. shows that Douglas T. Locke had been employed as an industrial electrician at job sites across Virginia, New York, and North Carolina since about 1948 — and that during 1948 and 1949 [he worked] on the construction of the cruiser U.S.S. Newport News, at the Newport News Shipbuilding and Drydock Company.

His suit alleged that between 1948 and 1972 he inhaled asbestos fibers and dust from the defendants' insulation products. In November 1977 he began experiencing impaired lung function; in June 1978, after surgery, he was diagnosed with mesothelioma. He filed suit on 24 July 1978 — and the trial court dismissed it as untimely under Virginia's two-year limitations statute, reasoning that the clock had started at his last exposure in September 1972.

The Supreme Court of Virginia reversed in 1981. It held that a cause of action accrues not at exposure, and not at diagnosis, but when the injury is actually sustained — the time the plaintiff was hurt, as established by competent evidence. Locke's suit, filed weeks after his diagnosis, was timely.

What the workforce left behind

The men and women of the yard sent her down the ways in 1947 and delivered her to the Navy on 29 January 1949. What they built outlived nearly all of them — she served until 1975 and was scrapped in 1993. Their story, where it survives at all, survives in yard records, in health studies of the tidewater workforce, and in court files like Locke's — documents that name names. The yard's own memory has a home of its own: the Mariners' Museum in Newport News — founded in 1932 by Archer M. Huntington, with Homer Ferguson a co-founder — holds the records of the Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company, some twenty-six cubic feet and more than two thousand photographs of the yard, its launchings, and its people, alongside the collection of Ellis Parker Griffith, the yard's official photographer, whose tens of thousands of exposures the museum is still working through name by name. Those names are carried on the Names & Records page.