Henry Eckford (1775-1832), godfather of American shipbuilding. The Greenpoint Eckfords baseball club was named after him but he never played the game

The patriotic pride of pre-Civil War Americans was their shipbuilding industry, which traced its beginnings to the naval vessels built by Henry Eckford during the War of 1812. Eckford taught the next generation of great American shipbuilders, including Isaac Webb, John Dimon and John Englis, whose yards lay along the New York City side of the East River near Corlear’s Hook. The shipyards of New York, Boston and other East Coast cities struck a blow for American economic independence by ending decades of British domination of long-range commercial shipping. Their primary weapon was the American clipper. These magnificent sailing ships set speed records to Europe, the West Coast and the Far East. Running out of space in the 1840s and 1850s, the New York City shipyards relocated to the sparsely populated farmland and orchards of Greenpoint and Williamsburg on the Brooklyn side of the East River.

The 1862 launch of the ironclad warship Monitor, built by John Ericsson in 101 days — The 1862 launch of the ironclad warship *Monitor,* built by John Ericsson in 101 days

Thousands of shipwrights and workers in dependent industries went with them, moving to Brooklyn from the 7th, 10th, 11th and 13th Wards of New York City. They brought their culture, including baseball and, according to legend, the peculiar way of talking that became known as Brooklynese. (If you go today to Greenpoint, where I am typing these words, and talk to a non-Polish-born local, you can still hear south, boiler and there pronounced “sowt,” “burluh” and “deh-ah”).

In 1855, Frank Pidgeon, William H. Bell and others formed the Eckford baseball club, named in honor of Henry. Like most of the original Eckfords, Pidgeon and Bell grew up around the New York City shipyards. For a while, the Eckfords straddled the East River, working and playing in Greenpoint while some continued to live in Manhattan. Pidgeon was a dock builder. Bell was a physician, but members of his family worked in shipbuilding. The Eckfords soon became one of the top clubs in Brooklyn and in the country, winning amateur baseball’s national championship in 1862 and 1863. The Greenpoint shipyards produced too many famous vessels to list here, but one of them was John Ericsson’s ironclad Monitor, launched in January 1862 and sunk off North Carolina’s Outer Banks eleven months later.

The Eckfords stopped playing baseball in the late 19th-century, but lasted as a social club and community organization until the 1960s. The shipyards of North Brooklyn are also long gone, but Greenpoint still has an Eckford Street, a Monitor Street and a Monitor monument.