Portsmouth Navy Yard

Established in 1800 to help the federal government expand the Navy against French privateer attacks on merchant shipping, the Portsmouth Navy Yard evolved from building wooden warships to ironclads and then submarines, survived repeated closure threats from the 1870s through 2005, and remained vital to the local economy. In 1905 Theodore Roosevelt proposed it as the site of peace talks between Japan and Russia, and the conference in Building 86 produced the treaty that ended the Russo-Japanese War and won him the Nobel Peace Prize. Among its most famous warships was the three-masted steam sloop U.S.S. Kearsarge, which on June 19, 1864 sank the Confederate raider CSS Alabama off Cherbourg, France, after a one-hour and twenty-minute battle, following Alabama's capture and burning of at least fifty-five Union merchant ships in the previous twenty-two months. The yard also included a castle-like prison built between 1903 and 1908, with additions in 1912 and 1943, that held more than 3,000 sailors and marines during World War II before closing in 1974. Fill gradually joined a cluster of islands in Portsmouth Harbor into the 278-acre site. The L-8, launched in 1917, was the first submarine built there; during World War II the yard built 79 submarines, launched a record four in one day in 1944, launched its first nuclear submarine in 1957 and its last in 1969, and now focuses on maintaining nuclear attack submarines. Since a major renovation in 1815, the Commandant’s House has housed Navy Yard commanders, beginning with Isaac Hull of the U.S.S. Constitution, and Admiral David Farragut spent his final days there and died in the house in 1870.

Portsmouth, New Hampshire · United States