A Beginning at East Braintree
History records that shipbuilding has been carried on in the Quincy area since 1696 when the ketch Unity was launched from Ship's Cove (Quincy Neck). Today it is the most important pursuit for the city's 88,000 inhabitants. When one looks at the geography of the area that was to become Fore River shipyard, one begins to wonder about the sanity of the yard's founder.
The yard is located along the Weymouth Fore River (hence its name) just southeast of Quincy center. Originally, part of it was marshy, but as the yard's founder, Thomas A. Watson observed, "the ground at Quincy Point is firm, but easily escavated." 5 It also had two creeks that cut in from the river. The smaller one, known as Howard's Creek was filled in soon after the yard was started up in 1901. The larger one, Bent Creek was the early wet basin with a long wharf built along the south shore. However, as time went on and more land was needed in the crowded location, the creek was steadily filled in at its upper end along Howard Street so that today none of the original configuration remains. It should be noted that the original width of the river opposite the ways was only 200 feet and the depth 25 feet at low tide.6
A further example of how location seemed to preclude the building of a shipyard at Quincy Point was the fact that Washington Street was carried over the Weymouth Fore River by a narrow draw bridge. This was (and is) across the yard's access to the sea. This did not bother Watson and his associates at all. The first vessel launched at Fore River was the protected cruiser Des Moines. She could not fit through the bridge and Watson cheerily speculated, " . . . the public interest in our enterprise was so great that we were sure we could get the county to build another bridge before we could finish that ship." 7 He was right and Watson's yard built the bridge!8
The last major problem faced by the yard was the limited space available for future expansion. Quincy Point in 1900 was a residential area and Watson could only secure about 100 acres.9 Today the yard comprises about 180 acres, 15 of which are yet to be developed.10 This growth was a long and difficult process.
Despite all these apparently insurmountable problems, Fore River shipyard became one of the great shipyards in the United States. This success was due probably as much to the foresight of
Thomas A. Watson its founder, as it was to the genius of Charles Schwab, S. Wiley Wakeman and others associated with Bethlehem Steel Corporation which owned the yard between 1913 and 1964.
Thomas Augustus Watson was born on January 18, 1854 in Salem, Massachusetts and went to work at the age of fourteen. The year 1872 found the talented young Watson working in the electrical shop of a one Charles William, Jr. on Court Street in Boston. It was to this shop that many of the inventors of that day came to have working models of their inventions made. In 1874, Professor Alexander Graham Bell of Boston University was assigned the young Watson to help him build his telephone. Everyone knows that the first words spoken on Bell's telephone were, "Watson, come here." 11 This was the beginning of telephony. By 1877 Bell had given the imaginative Watson a considerable stake in his neophyte Bell Telephone Company. When Bell went to Europe, Watson became head of the Research Department of Bell Telephone Company. Watson, an ever restless soul grew tired of communications research and finally retired from the telephone business altogether in 1881. The following year was spent traveling abroad and upon his return to the United States in September of 1882 he married Elizabeth Kimball of Cohasset.12
In 1882 Watson purchased a 60 acre farm with a half-mile of shoreline along the Weymouth Fore River in East Braintree. On this farm was one large house, a barn and several good outbuildings. It was on this farm that Watson, in 1883, experimented with all sorts of new farming techniques and devices that his scientific mind had devised, but the farm proved to be too small to produce results. Besides, the rigors of farm toil depleted his health. It was at that point that Watson decided to return to mechanics.
A Lexington, Massachusetts mechanic by the name of L. J. Wing had begun to develop a rotary steam engine. Approaching Watson on the prospect of developing it, he found him to be receptive.13 Work on the engine was quite complicated so Watson hired Frank O. Wellington to help with the project. Work on the engine began in the winter of 1884 but by the spring of 1885 it had proven to be a mechanical failure and a financial albatross. What grew out of this experience, however, was a friendship between Watson and Wellington that was to last for a lifetime, and more
importantly a desire to build marine engines for yachts and tugs, which, in the end led both into the shipbuilding business. 14 This was the beginning of the partnership known as the Fore River Engine Company.
The first order that Watson and Wellington received was for a 50 h.p. engine for a small passenger steamer owned by a Mr. Delano of Damariscotta, Maine. The two began work on the engine in a small room warmed by an oil stove.15 Along with the engine work came a decision to build small boats. The first boat launched by Fore River Engine Company at East Braintree was the Barnacle for a Marblehead, Massachusetts gentleman. It had an alcohol vaporizing engine. Because of the narrowness of the river, boats were hauled across the mud by a capstan and an old white horse. Castings came from the old Howard Foundry and John McCafferty supplied the brass. 16 Boat building was good for the local economy.
It was during this time that Watson made the momentous decision to go into shipbuilding. He was later to observe in his autobiography that, "It was a momentous decision for from it came one of the largest shipbuilding establishments in the country, if not in the world, that made Massachusetts again a shipbuilding center and afterwards played an important part in the World War."17
Despite the experience earlier with the ill-fated Wing engine, Watson maintained an abiding appreciation for steam and thus was quite content in his new pursuits. 18 The steam engine built by Fore River Engine Company soon became well known all along the entire New England coast and gave the company a considerable reputation. The engine was of the typical reciprocating variety, but it had several new features among which were a radial valve gear and slow running boiler feed pumps.19 Orders for this engine came flowing in and soon the Watson farm was hosting a work force of twenty to thirty men in a new engine shop that had just been built. 20
The Fore River Engine Company did not limit itself to marine engines. The company also turned out Prouty printing presses, Dudley guns for coastal defense, staple heeling machines for the numerous shoe factories dotting eastern Massachusetts, and electric lighting for many area plants.21 Watson, a humanitarian throughout his life, engaged his company in such diversified work in order to give employment to his friends and neighbors. By 1896, with the depression in the nation deepening, there was little work for the Fore River Engine Company to do.
It was during this depression that the United States Navy came through with what turned out to be a most opportune naval contract which in its total effect, drastically altered the employment and financial situation of Fore River Engine Company.22 The Navy contracted for the construction of two 400 ton torpedo boat
destroyers, the Lawrence and the Macdonough. The total cost was $562,000.00. As Watson observed, "This was the turning point in my life as well as in the destinies of the Fore River Engine Company." 23
A former employee, Charles Edwards was brought back from Canada to help yard manager, Frank O. Wellington with the two ships. The ships were 246' 3" x 22' 2" x 12' 10" and both had a 4-cylinder, triple expansion engine rated at about 8400 h.p. They were fired by water tube boilers.24 This lucrative Navy contract brought employment on the Watson farm to about 300 men, and no doubt saved the Fore River Engine Company from financial ruin.25 These two torpedo boat destroyers were launched at the turn of the century, the Macdonough being the last ship launched by Watson at the East Braintree site. Both were delivered to the Navy in 1903.
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