Industrialist
Collis P. Huntington (1821–1900) provided crucial funding to complete the
Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad (C&O) from
Richmond, Virginia, to the
Ohio River in the early 1870s. Although originally built for general commerce, this C&O rail link to the midwest was soon also being used to transport
bituminous coal from the previously isolated coalfields, adjacent to the
New River and the
Kanawha River in
West Virginia. In 1881, the
Peninsula Extension of the C&O was built from Richmond down the
Virginia Peninsula to reach a new
coal pier on
Hampton Roads in
Warwick County near the small
unincorporated community of
Newport News Point. However, building the railroad and coal pier was only the first part of Huntington's dreams for Newport News.
The shipyard's early years , 2020 In 1886, Huntington built a
shipyard to repair ships servicing this transportation hub. In 1891 Newport News Shipbuilding and Drydock Company delivered its first ship, the
tugboat Dorothy. By 1897 NNS had built three warships for the
US Navy: , and . When Collis died in 1900, his nephew
Henry E. Huntington inherited much of his uncle's fortune. He also married Collis' widow
Arabella Huntington, and assumed Collis' leadership role with Newport News Shipbuilding and Drydock Company. Under Henry Huntington's leadership, growth continued. In 1906 the revolutionary launched a great naval race worldwide. Between 1907 and 1923, Newport News built six of the
US Navy's total of 22
dreadnoughts – , , , , and . All but the first were in active service in
World War II. In 1907 President
Theodore Roosevelt sent the
Great White Fleet on its round-the-world voyage. NNS had built seven of its 16
battleships. In 1914 NNS built SS
Medina for the
Mallory Steamship Company; as she was until 2009 the world's oldest active ocean-faring
passenger ship.
Newport News and the shipyard In the early years, leaders of the Newport News community and those of the shipyard were virtually interchangeable. Shipyard president
Walter A. Post served from March 9, 1911, to February 12, 1912, when he died. Earlier, he had come to the area as one of the builders of the C&O Railway's terminals, and had served as the first mayor of Newport News after it became an
independent city in 1896. It was on March 14, 1914, that Albert Lloyd Hopkins, a young New Yorker trained in engineering, succeeded Post as president of the company. In May 1915 while traveling to England on shipyard business aboard , Hopkins died when that ship was
torpedoed and sunk by a German
U-boat off
Queenstown on the Irish coast. His assistant, Frederic Gauntlett, was also on board, but was able to swim to safety.
Homer Lenoir Ferguson was company vice president when Hopkins died, and assumed the presidency the following August. He saw the company through both world wars, became a noted community leader, and was a co-founder of the
Mariners' Museum with Archer Huntington. He served until July 31, 1946, after
World War II had ended on both the European and Pacific fronts. Just northwest of the shipyard,
Hilton Village, one of the first planned communities in the country, was built by the federal government to house shipyard workers in 1918. The planners met with the wives of shipyard workers. Based on their input 14 house plans were designed for the projected 500 English-village-style homes. After the war, in 1922, Henry Huntington acquired it from the government, and helped facilitate the sale of the homes to shipyard employees and other local residents. Three streets there were named after Post, Hopkins, and Ferguson.
Navy orders during and after World War I The
Lusitania incident was among the events that brought the United States into World War I. Between 1918 and 1920 NNS delivered 25
destroyers, and after the war it began building
aircraft carriers. was delivered in 1934, and NNS went on to build and . In 1917, the year the U.S entered World War I, the Newport News Shipbuilding & Drydock Company was contracted to build several ships for the U.S military. In order to fulfill this contract, the company had to hire thousands of employees from across the country. However, a large problem arose: the city of Newport News did not have the housing to support this large influx of its population. This led to the creation of Hilton Village, a neighborhood still found in Newport News, Virginia, today, that was created to house these workers.
Ocean liners After World War I NNS completed a major reconditioning and refurbishment of the
ocean liner . Before the war she had been the German liner
Vaterland, but the start of hostilities found her laid up in
New York Harbor and she had been seized by the US Government in 1917 and converted into a
troopship. War duty and age meant that all wiring, plumbing, and interior layouts were stripped and redesigned while her hull was strengthened and her boilers converted from coal to oil while being refurbished. Virtually a new ship emerged from NNS in 1923, and SS
Leviathan became the
flagship of
United States Lines. In 1927 NNS launched the world's first significant
turbo-electric ocean liner:
Panama Pacific Line's . At the time she was also the largest merchant ship yet built in the United States,
Post-war era In the post-war years NNS built the passenger liner , which set a
transatlantic speed record that still stands today. In 1954 NNS,
Westinghouse and the US Navy developed and built a prototype
nuclear reactor for a carrier propulsion system. NNS designed in 1960. In 1959 NNS launched its first nuclear-powered
submarine, . In April 1966, the yard reached an agreement to address its policy of racial discrimination. Although the area has a large Black population, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission found that only 32 of the almost 2,000 supervisors at the facility were Black. The most recent apprentice class of over 500 had only six Blacks. The shipyard agreed to provide promotions and pay raises to Blacks who had been discriminated against and to provide accelerated promotion to qualified Blacks In the 1970s, NNS launched two of the largest
tankers ever built in the western hemisphere and also constructed three
liquefied natural gas carriers – at over 390,000 deadweight tons, the largest ever built in the United States. NNS and
Westinghouse Electric Company jointly formed
Offshore Power Systems to build floating nuclear power plants for
Public Service Electric and Gas Company. In the 1980s, NNS produced a variety of navy products, including nuclear aircraft carriers and nuclear attack submarines. Since 1999 the shipyard has only produced warships for the navy.
Submarine building problems In 2007, the US Navy found that workers had used the incorrect metal to fuse together pipes and joints on submarines under construction and this could have eventually led to cracking and leaks. In 2009 it was found that bolts and fasteners in weapons-handling systems on four Navy submarines, , , , and , were installed incorrectly, delaying the launching of the boats while the problems were corrected.
Mergers, realignment, and spin-off In 1968, Newport News merged with
Tenneco Corporation. In 1996, Tenneco initiated a spinoff of Newport News into an independent company (Newport News Shipbuilding). In 2001,
General Dynamics made a second bid to purchase the company after a failed bid in 1999. Such a merger would have eliminated competition for the production of
Virginia-class submarines, which have only been made by Newport News and GD subsidiary
Electric Boat. Northrop Grumman matched GD with a similar bid, and following a Department of Justice anti-trust lawsuit to block GD's bid, GD called off their bid. Now as the sole bidder, Northrop Grumman purchased the company for $2.6 billion and renamed it "Northrop Grumman Newport News". This division was merged with
Northrop Grumman Ship Systems in 2008 and given the name "
Northrop Grumman Shipbuilding". Three years later, the company was
spun off as
Huntington Ingalls Industries, Inc., which trades under the symbol HII on the
New York Stock Exchange.
Presidents •
Matt Mulherin (2011–2017) •
Jennifer Boykin (2017–2024) • Kari Wilkinson (2024-present) ==Ships built==