This shipyard started life in 1922, in a corner of the Dodge automobile plant in Detroit, the brainchild of Horace E. Dodge.  Two years later, he created the Horace E. Dodge Boat Works in Detroit, and was soon building several hundred boats a year, with Defoe Boat Works as a subcontractor.  In 1929, he renamed it the Horace E. Dodge Boat & Plane Company and moved it to a 100-acre site in Newport News VA, which apparently cost over $2 million to develop and employed 700 workers, producing 40 boats a day.  In WWII, they built 27 rescue boats, 25 mooring tugs, 74 landing craft and possibly something else, since there's a gap in the schedule between the mooring tugs and the landing craft.

The company built some of the most beautiful launches and runabouts, which are now collector's items.  There is a great web site at www.dodgeboat.org.  Make sure you check all the old advertisements reproduced here.  One of them actually shows a sketch of the layout of the yard in Newport News: is it possible that one of our loyal readers in the Newport News area knows where this facility was located?  If anyone has any information about this yard, please send it to me at tim@coltoncompany.com.