page_title: James Walker Fowler House
section_title: Marvel Shipyards
hierarchical_section_title: James Walker Fowler House / Owners / Marvels (1892—1918) / Marvel Shipyards
caption_attribution_description: English: Homer Ramsdell, Hudson River steamboat built 1887.
context_page_description: The James Walker Fowler House was a historic house in Newburgh, New York, built by Judge James Walker Fowler c. 1850. After Fowler's death, the house passed through two owners before becoming the residence of Captain Thomas S. Marvel, a shipyard owner at the turn of the 20th century. In the 1970s, the house was demolished as part of the city's Urban Renewal efforts.
context_section_description: At his purchase of the house, Captain Thomas Stahl Marvel and his wife Hattie Burns had four children and managed the thriving Marvel Shipyards. The site occupies the current Newburgh People's Park at the foot of Washington Street, and has been a vacant grassy lot since the removal of a scrapyard.  
  
  Marvel's father, Thomas S. Marvel, was born in Newport, Rhode Island in 1808. He entered the shipbuilding industry as a boy, apprenticing with shipwright Isaac Webb in New York.  Marvel moved upriver to the bustling shipping village of Newburgh around 1836 to begin a lucrative yet small shipbuilding company . Mainly constructing sloops, small wooden sailing vessels, and schooners, Marvel operated near the foot of Ann Street.  The yard's second location was Norris's Dock at the foot of Renwick Street, nearer to the location Marvel's son would begin his own company. This provided a marine railway for easy receiving of goods and materials. 
  In the spring of 1847, a sloop commissioned by Hiram Travis of Peekskill launched from Newburgh. For many years it served as a merchant sailing vessel, named the Thomas S. Marvel, presumably for its high craftsmanship.  The yard's second notable vessel, 160 feet in length, reached completion in 1853, thought to be Marvel's first steamboat. It ran on a Wolff engine, which used a more efficient high-and-low pressure steam operating system. 
  Thomas S. Marvel II, born 1834 in New York, joined his father in 1847 at 13 years old.  Following the success of the first steamboat, one of Marvel's first projects involved building a new steamboat hull to prove himself. His finished product, the Mohawk Chief, weighed about 85 tons, with a length of 86 feet. Assured with his son's progress the elder Marvel retired in 1860, but may have afterwards commanded sailing vessels on the Hudson. Father and son frequently prefixed their names with "Captain." Marvel I died in 1871. 
  At age 21, Marvel began his own business by taking ownership of his father's yard. He recruited George F. Riley, another shipwright, to assist him, but the partnership broke off as Marvel went to enlist in the Union Army in April 1861. For a brief time, Marvel served as Captain of Company A in the 56th New York Volunteers. He returned due to illness in 1862, but focused on minor shipbuilding efforts at Port Richmond, Staten Island, and in Denton, Maryland.  During this time, he married Hattie Burns, of Monroe, and the couple had a son, Harry, in 1865 on Staten Island.
  In the 1870s, Ward, Stanton & Co., formerly Newburgh manufacturers of iron, entered shipbuilding, which continued to expand on the waterfront even as brick making began to rise.  John Delany, an immigrant from Kilkenny, Ireland, formed a partnership with Samuel Stanton, superintendent of Washington Iron Works, and Luther C. Ward, a manager, in 1872.  Their first location was a dock and large brick building on the east side of South Water Street. In 1877, the persuaded Marvel to join their firm and manage their new yards, to which he obliged.  With subsequent enlargement, the company hired 300 men to construct wooden and iron steam vessels, ferry-boats, engines, boilers and towing propellors.  The works crumbled after a ruinous fire in 1882. Two years later, Marvel joined Delany in formation of the Thomas S. Marvel Shipyards.  
  The new shipyards set out to built first-class vessels, and equipped to do so with a workspace of 300 feet long, 400 feet deep.  In 1888, about 200 men worked at the yards, which repaired just as many ships as it built new ones.  As Harry Marvel came of age, he began to work in the shipyards, and by 1908 served as a superintendent, arguably company's climax. Delaney left in 1904, at which point the name changed to Thomas S. Marvel Shipbuilding Company, and later the Harry A. Marvel & Co. Shipbuilding Company.
caption: Homer Ramsdell, designed by Thomas S. Marvel
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