Thames Shipyard and Tow Boat Company

     Two collections in the McGuire Library have to do with New London's historic Thames Shipyard and a related business, the Thames Tow Boat Company.

     For a collection of newspaper stories published in The Day in the 1970s about the Shipyard's protracted effort to buy the land it had leased for decades from the Coast Guard, Gene fashioned large-format albums to turn the thick stack of 11x14-inch photocopies into a convenient chronological sequence.  

     Although the Shipyard story is the focus of this material, other news was included by the photocopyist, providing a good look at maritime activity in New London in the 1970s.

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     For a collection of photographs and documents of the Thames Tow Boat Company and Shipyard dating from 1900 to the early 1960s, discovered in a Custom House storeroom, Gene arranged the material in 46 folders accomodated in this archival box.  The collection had been in the possession of Lawrence A. Chappell, Jr., a descendant of Shipyard founder Frank H. Chappell. 

     Gene also made a Finding Aid to index the contents of the collection. The first three pages (below) conclude with a historic photo of the tugboat Paul Jones, built at the Shipyard in 1904 and sunk in the English Channel in 1916 after she had been sold to the French government during World War I.  

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