Orange's location at a bend in the Sabine River beside the immense virgin pine forests of southeast Texas made it an ideal shipbuilding site, but by 1930 the easily obtainable timber was exhausted, the sawmills had closed, and the Depression of the 1930s weighed heavily on the town. 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 craft and twelve destroyers in Orange. At that time the Office of Supervisor of Shipbuilding, USN, Orange, Texas, was established with CDR. E.B. Perry as the first supervisor, responsible for directing construction of the thirty-six craft and establishing a shipyard in Orange to support the effort. The facility was built on sixty-five acres at a bend in the Sabine River, with Levingston Shipbuilding's tugboat and barge shipyard on a small portion of the west side and the rest occupied by Consolidated Steel Corporation's steel fabricating plant, where the supervisor's office 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 Maintenance Facility.
