New York Shipbuilding Corporation is one of the most confusingly named companies in the Philadelphia region, writes Avi Wolfman-Arent for the Post x News.

The company was born in 1899. Its founder, Henry Morse, wanted to locate the New York Ship, as the company was often called, at a site in Staten Island.

However, after he failed to secure the plot he wanted, he relocated the company to a space along the Delaware River in Camden, New Jersey just north of the Walt Whitman Bridge.

As he had already filed the incorporation papers with the name he originally envisioned for the company, New York Shipbuilding Corporation, he just decided to keep the name. Whether his choice was made out of thrift or laziness, to this day remains unknown.

However the strange name for its location did not slow down the company’s growth. It became the largest shipyard in the world by 1917 by building vessels for America’s rapidly growing naval fleet.

It was also big enough to build the nation’s first federally funded planned community in Camden for workers and their families, called Yorkship Village.

Read more about the  New York Shipbuilding Corporation in the Post x News.

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On July 21, 1959, underneath a giant covered shipway at the New York Shipbuilding Corporation in Camden, First Lady Mamie Eisenhower christened the world’s first nuclear merchant ship.