09/01/2026
One hundred fifty-four ships. That's how many vessels a shipyard on the Saginaw River in Bay City, Michigan built for the U.S. Navy during World War Two, in a stretch of just a few years.
The company was Defoe Shipbuilding, started in 1905 on the banks of the Saginaw River by a man named Harry J. Defoe under the much smaller name Defoe Boat and Motor Works. Before the war, it mostly built patrol boats for the Coast Guard and private yachts for people who could afford one, a modest regional operation on a modest Michigan river.
Then the war came, and Bay City's whole shipyard turned itself inside out for it.
From 1939 through 1945, nearly all of Defoe's production went straight to the war effort. Destroyer escorts, minesweepers, high-speed transports, patrol craft, landing craft, one hundred fifty-four hulls in total, built on a stretch of river most people outside Michigan couldn't find on a map.
Here's how they managed that pace. Defoe's welders developed what they called an upside-down and roll-over welding method, a technique that let them flip a hull partway through construction so crews could weld from the easiest angle instead of working overhead or underneath. That single innovation let the yard turn out a 173-foot patrol craft roughly once a week, a build speed that sounds more like an assembly line for cars than for warships.
Bay City wasn't working alone, either. Down the river, the older West Bay City Shipbuilding Company, founded back in 1876 by Frank W. Wheeler, had already spent decades building Great Lakes cargo vessels and steamers before it closed in 1908, laying down the skilled labor and riverside infrastructure that made Defoe's wartime surge possible in the first place.
Once the war ended, Defoe didn't just shrink back down to yachts and patrol boats. The yard kept building serious vessels for decades after, including Great Lakes bulk carriers and guided-missile destroyers for both the U.S. Navy and the Royal Australian Navy.
Here's the detail that connects a Michigan shipyard to one of the most famous ocean discoveries in history. Defoe also built research vessels, and one of them, launched on August 21, 1968, and delivered to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in 1970, was named the RV Knorr. That ship went on to a career that outlasted the shipyard itself.
In the summer of 1985, oceanographer Robert Ballard took the Knorr out with a deep-sea robot named Argo, under an arrangement where the Navy would only pay for the trip if he first used it to survey two lost nuclear submarines, the USS Scorpion and USS Thresher. Once that job was done, Ballard's team swept Argo back and forth across the ocean floor and picked up a trail of scattered wreckage. They followed it straight to the Titanic, more than seven decades after it sank. A vessel built on the Saginaw River in Bay City helped find one of the most searched-for shipwrecks on Earth.
Defoe Shipbuilding finally closed on December 31, 1976, after its Navy contracts ran out and weren't renewed. Seventy-one years of shipbuilding on that stretch of river, ending not with a dramatic collapse but with the plain fact that the work had run out, the way a lot of Michigan's heavy industry eventually did once the contracts that fed it dried up.
Most people driving through Bay City today have no idea a city that size once helped build a wartime fleet from a riverbank, then helped find the Titanic on the way out the door.
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