Founded in April 1915, the Submarine Boat Company operated on a principle borrowed from Henry Ford: break the work into pieces and distribute it. Rather than building each ship from scratch, the company had other shipyards prefabricate roughly eighty percent of the hull sections. Merchant Shipbuilding Corporation in Bristol, Pennsylvania, and American International Shipbuilding at Hog Island in Philadelphia provided the components, which were then assembled at Newark. The result was a shipyard that could complete vessels at remarkable speed. The company received a contract from the United States Shipping Board's Emergency Fleet Corporation for 150 ships -- steel-hulled Design 1023 cargo vessels, each displacing 3,642 deadweight tons. They were workhorses, not warships: built to carry grain, munitions, and materiel across the Atlantic to Allied ports.

Of the 150 contracted ships, 118 were completed before the armistice rendered the contract unnecessary and it was canceled. The remaining 32 hulls did not go to waste. The company finished them on its own account and sold them to the Transmarine Corporation, a shipping line it also operated. These vessels, along with 30 barges built after the war in 1920, formed the backbone of Transmarine's cargo routes along the East Coast, to the Gulf of Mexico, Cuba, and South America. The barges worked the New York State Canal System with five tugboats, moving freight from New York City to Buffalo in seven to nine days. To service all this traffic, the company incorporated the Atlantic Port Railway in 1920, a common carrier line with eighteen miles of track and fifty-nine miles of yard sidings connecting the Port Newark docks to the Central Railroad of New Jersey and the Pennsylvania Railroad.

Shipbuilding ended in 1922, but the company's expertise with steel earned it one final project: in 1923, the Newton Amusement Corporation contracted the Submarine Boat Company to supply fifty tons of steel columns for a 1,000-seat stadium theater. It was the last job before the yard fell silent. Transmarine continued operating its shipping routes through the 1920s, but without new contracts, the parent company entered receivership in 1929. The shipyard itself sat dormant for over a decade. When World War II created a new demand for ships, the site was reopened -- not by Electric Boat's subsidiary, but by Federal Shipbuilding and Drydock Company, which operated its main yard 2.8 miles to the north in Kearny, New Jersey.

Today, the site where thousands of workers once assembled cargo ships for the Atlantic convoys is a Toyota Logistics Services automobile terminal at 390 East Port Street, Newark, just south of Interstate 78. The transformation is total. No plaques mark the spot. No remnant of a slipway or crane foundation survives among the parking lots full of imported sedans. The Electric Boat Company, the Submarine Boat Company's parent, fared better: it became General Dynamics Electric Boat and remains one of the primary builders of nuclear submarines for the United States Navy. The subsidiary's legacy is quieter -- 150 cargo ships that kept supply lines open during a war fought largely at sea, built by workers whose shipyard bore a name that had nothing to do with what they actually made.