Newport News Ship Building Co.'s yards, Va.

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Newport News Shipbuilding, the yard shown here, sits on the James River estuary in Virginia and grew into one of the largest shipbuilding operations in the country. The company was founded in 1886 and by the early 1900s was building warships and merchant vessels for the Navy and private owners, so this view captures a working industrial waterfront at a time of rapid expansion. The photograph is a glass negative from the Detroit Publishing Company, a firm known for large-format views of American places made for sale as commercial prints. Its piers and wharves give a sense of how heavily the yard depended on river access to move materials and launch hulls.

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