Office of the Supervisor of Shipbuilding and Consolidated Steel Corporation
Orange, Orange County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Orange's location at a bend in the Sabine River, adjacent to the immense virgin pine forests of southeast Texas, made it an ideal site for shipbuilding. However, by 1930 all of the easily obtainable timber was exhausted, and the associated sawmills closed. The Depression of the 1930s also weighed heavily on the population of Orange. In July 1940, Congressman Martin Dies and Vice-President John Nance Garner attached an amendment to a large general appropriations bill to build twenty-four surf-landing crafts and twelve destroyers in Orange. The Office of Supervisor of Shipbuilding, USN, Orange, Texas, was established at this time, with CDR E.B. Perry as the first supervisor. The supervisor was responsible for directing the construction of the thirty-six crafts, and also the establishment of a shipyard in Orange to support the endeavor. The facility was built on sixty-five acres at a bend in the Sabine River. Levingston Shipbuilding's tugboat and barge shipyard occupied a small portion of the west side, and the remainder was occupied by Consolidated Steel Corporation's steel fabricating plant, where the Office of the Supervisor was also located. On May 14, 1941, construction began at Consolidated Steel on the Destroyers USS Aulick and USS Charles Ausburne, the first two warships constructed on the gulf coast for the U.S. government. In total, thirty-nine destroyers and 100 destroyer escorts were built at the Consolidated Steel Corporation yard during World War II. After the war, the Naval facility prepared ships for storage in the Naval Reserve Fleet as the United States Naval Inactive Ship Naintenance Facility. (2008)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Orange's position at a bend in the Sabine River beside vast pine forests made it a natural shipbuilding town, but by 1930 the timber was exhausted, the sawmills closed, and the Depression bore down. In 1940 Texas lawmakers secured a federal appropriation to build landing craft and destroyers there, establishing the Navy's Office of Supervisor of Shipbuilding and a sprawling yard operated largely by Consolidated Steel. Beginning in 1941 the yard launched the first warships built on the Gulf Coast for the U.S. government, ultimately producing 39 destroyers and 100 destroyer escorts during World War II.
Why it matters
Orange's wartime shipyards show how World War II mobilization revived a depressed timber town into a major arsenal of democracy, reshaping the industrial map of the Gulf Coast.
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Related people
- · Martin Dies
- · John Nance Garner
Related events
- · World War II
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Levingston Shipbuilding Company and Edward T. Malloy
Orange, TX
Irish immigrant brothers bought an existing Orange shipyard in 1859 and built wooden ships for decades, a trade their descendants carried into the steel age. Under Edward T. Malloy, who joined in 1939 and later bought control, Levingston Shipbuilding boomed during World War II, delivering 160 tugs, tankers, and rescue vessels to the Army and Navy between 1941 and 1945. After the war it reinvented itself as a world leader in offshore drilling rigs before closing in 1985.
Riverside Addition: World War II Housing in Orange
Orange, TX
When the U.S. Navy placed shipbuilding orders in Orange on the eve of World War II, a sleepy Sabine River town of 7,400 swelled past 60,000 as Depression-weary workers chased steady wages at the Levingston, Consolidated Western, and Weaver yards. To house them, the federal government threw up the Riverside Addition in 1942 — thousands of prefabricated 'demountable' duplexes, three schools, and shops, all within walking distance of the yards to conserve rationed fuel and tires. Billed as the largest federal housing project ever undertaken, it was always meant to be temporary, and after the war the units were sold, moved, or torn down, with the last gone by the 1980s.
Weaver Shipbuilding
Orange, TX
Joe Weaver opened his shipyard on the Sabine at Orange in 1897, and for generations the Weaver family built barges, tugboats, and shrimp boats along the Texas Gulf Coast. During World War II the yard turned out wooden minesweepers and sub chasers — vessels built of wood precisely because they would not trip the magnetic mines the enemy laid in coastal waters. Sold and then reclaimed by the family, the site remains in Weaver hands and in maritime use to this day.
United States Naval Inactive Ship Maintenance Facility
Orange, TX
As World War II ended, the United States found itself with the largest navy in human history—and a hard question of what to do with the surplus. Rather than scrap the ships, planners chose to preserve a "mothball fleet" that could be reactivated fast, and in 1945 the fresh water of the Sabine River made Orange, Texas, an ideal berth. The first vessel, USS Matagorda, arrived that November, and when the Korean War erupted in 1950 the facility roused more than thirty ships back to service. It operated until 1975, its last hulls towed away, sold abroad, or scrapped by 1980.