Most recent update: December 20, 2021.

A Philadelphia shipbuilder named Thomas Reaney left Reaney, Neafie & Levy in 1859 to start his own shipyard in Chester, called Reaney, Son & Archbold.  Over the next 11 years, he built 6 naval combatants, 20 cargo ships, 17 tugs and 8 smaller craft, an average of almost five boats a year.  He was undercapitalized, however and when he ran out of work in the slump that followed the Civil War, he was forced to sell the yard to a New York industrialist named John Roach, who renamed it The Delaware River Iron Shipbuilding & Engine Works, although it was widely known just as Roach's Shipyard and is often referred to as John Roach & Sons, although that was never the name of the shipyard but was the name of its parent company.  Roach was an Irish immigrant who had become a major manufacturer of marine engines, owning both Aetna Iron Works and Morgan Iron Works.  Roach invested heavily in big cranes, steam engines and state-of-the-art machinery, all of which were intended to lower the cost of building a ship and he started several other companies in the region which could supply the shipyard with most of its material.  Throughout the 1870s and into the 1880s, the shipyard was the largest, most modern and most productive in the U.S., but when John Roach died, the company declined and closed in 1908. 

In 1913, the idle shipyard was bought by a retired US Navy Captain named Charles Jack and reopened as Chester Shipbuilding Company.  The onset of World War I made the yard's size and potential capability very attractive, but Jack did not have the money needed to re-equip it and in 1917 he sold it to Averell Harriman's American Ship & Commerce Corporation, which renamed it Merchant Shipbuilding Company and set about turning it into a mass-production ship assembly facility, along the lines of the Hog Island yard in Philadelphia and the Submarine Boat yard in Newark NJ.  It is ironic that this approach to shipbuilding, so effective in both WWI and WWII, was quite the opposite of John Roach's approach.  In any case, the new owners soon decided that the Chester yard was not nearly as suitable for mass production as they had thought and they set up a wholly new yard upstream, in the Bristol section of Philadelphia.  The Chester yard continued in operation, however, closing for good in 1924. 

The shipyard occupied 23 acres along about 1,200 feet of Chester's industrial waterfront, stretching from Pennell Street to Fulton Street along West Front Street, just north of the present-day Commodore Barry bridge.  It had ten building berths and six wet berths, although there is no sign of any of them today.  After it closed in 1924, the site was redeveloped as a Ford assembly plant.  That plant closed in 1961 and the site has been idle ever since.  See the site from the air on Google here.  If anyone can fill any of the gaps in the table below, please e-mail me at timcolton@aol.com

Built by Reaney, Son & Archbold (1857-1870)

Built by Delaware River Iron Shipbuilding & Engine Works as a subsidiary of J. Roach & Sons (1871-1887)