The unlikely connection between a New York industrial giant of the Gilded Age and a small rural county in Iowa
Second of two newsletters dealing with Naval ships named for Iowa, its people, and places.
Eighteen counties in Iowa have Naval ships named for them. Seventeen of them share the naming honor with counties by the same name in other states.
There is only one Iowa County that has a ship named exclusively for it.
Are you thinking that it must have been one of the larger counties? Well, if you want to try to guess starting with the largest county and going down the list, you are going to be wrong more than 80 times before you come to the right answer.
Stay tuned; more to come.
How ships are named
Even with thousands of ships to name over the years, the U.S. Navy ignored America’s counties in choosing ship names, while favoring the names of states, many cities, and accomplished people for ships, until the 1940s.
Counties won the right to have their names emblazoned on the hulls of large, impressive ships after the U.S. entered World War II, which resulted in the most frenzied ship-building era for any country in history.
Areas of great need for large numbers of ships included cargo ships, destroyer escort ships, and the specialized cargo-transport ships needed to deliver tanks, heavy equipment, and troops to low-slope beaches with no docks or piers. By the time the war was over, roughly 3½ years after it started, the Navy had acquired more than 2,000 cargo ships, about 1,200 of the specialized tank and troop transport ships, and 563 destroyer escorts. There were new battleships, submarines, and destroyers as well, but these numbers were much smaller.
During the war, the specialized tank and troop transport ships, which also carried other needed heavy equipment, generally served without names. After the war, many of them were disposed of, and about 160 of the remaining ships received the names of counties — but with a catch.
The county names were usually selected to satisfy multiple states.
Thus, for example, the USS Montgomery County became the name of one of these ships. Was that for Montgomery County, Iowa? Yes and (No x 17).
It was for all 18 of the counties Montgomery in 18 different states.
And so, with the stroke of about 160 names, perhaps as many as 1,500 counties – half of all the counties in the U.S. – had Naval ships named for them.
In Iowa, these counties, in addition to Montgomery, were Benton, Boone, Buchanan, Calhoun, Clarke, Floyd, Hamilton, Henry, Jefferson, Johnson, Lee, Linn, Lyon, Marion, Monroe, and Page.
There is only one county in Iowa that had a Naval ship named exclusively for itself. More to come.
The Liberty Ships: A Forgotten Story from World War II
For more generalized Naval needs, a standardized, plain-looking design was established that could be built by any shipbuilding company. They all would look the same, but the Navy would be able to easily adapt them for a range of specialized needs with modifications.
The ships were 440 feet long and would cost around $2 million each, the equivalent of about $45 million today. They could be built from scratch and launched at a record pace of 24 days each – at a time when building a battleship, by comparison, took 3 years.
The Federal Maritime Commission was charged with executing the plan to build and launch these ships, and then the Navy stepped in to bring each new ship under its umbrella.
These ships were called Liberty ships, and President Roosevelt made no apologies for their design or appearance. It was “a dreadful looking object,” he said.
A total of 2,710 dreadful-looking Liberty ships were built and launched during the war at the incredibly amazing pace of three ships every two days.
The Maritime Commission named some of these ships itself, generally for people of accomplishment and stature. Some of these names seem to have stayed with these ships after they were turned over to the Navy. In other cases, the Navy changed the ship's name after taking control of it.
In general, however, naming and even finding enough women to become “sponsors,” meaning they would attend the launching, christen the ship, and generally maintain a spiritual connection with its crew, became a problem.
Sometimes, the job fell to the wives of men working on the ship-building lines. When Mrs. Martín Staley, wife of a reamer, was selected for the honor of christening the USS Nathaniel Hawthorne, she took no chances on muffing the job. For several weeks ahead of time, she practiced by smashing milk bottles against the side of the barn on their farm near Yault, Washington.* When the moment came, she proved that practice made perfect.
*Credit for this wonderful nugget of information goes to “Tip of the Wave,” found on the Internet, but no further information provided.
Sixty-five of the Liberty ships were destined to become Navy cargo ships. Sixty-three of the 65 received the names of constellations when commissioned by the Navy. Two were given the names of U.S. counties for reasons that seem lost in time and history today.
The USS Prince George’s County was named for a metropolitan county in Maryland bordering Washington, D.C., and with about 1 million residents today.
The other Liberty ship that became a Navy cargo ship named for a county began life named for a U.S. industrialist who appears to merit such an honor. But the Navy wanted a different name for this ship. Thus, a Navy warship was christened, the...
USS Appanoose County
Appanoose County, in south central Iowa, is one of the state’s most rural and least populous counties, with 12,000 residents today, half as many as it had during World War II.
About the only thing Appanoose County and Prince George’s County have in common is that both counties are almost exactly 500 square miles in size.
There does not appear to be any easily available record of how these two counties ended up with their names on Liberty cargo ships, or, in particular, how a relatively obscure county — its largest city, Centerville, has a population of 5,000 today — in Iowa ended up as one of the few counties among the 3,000 counties of the United States that has a Naval ship named exclusively for it.
Here is what is known about the USS Appanoose, beginning with its history before it became the Appanoose.
The Federal Maritime Commission, an independent federal agency responsible for regulating the U.S. international ocean transportation system, began construction in 1944 of a ship named the A. J. Cassatt, in memory of a legendary president of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company, the largest corporation in the world during Cassatt’s time of service. His stature seems a good fit with others for whom some Naval ships were named.
Cassatt, born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, began working for the Penn Railroad on a survey crew at about age 23 in 1862. He quickly worked his way up the corporate ladder. In 1882, he was the company’s first vice-president and was widely regarded as an easy choice for the top job when the company’s president died unexpectedly.
Surprise. He didn’t get the job. He quit.
Cassatt then went into retirement, but kept extremely active with projects that interested him – everything from horse breeding (seven Preakness and Belmont Stakes winners) to serving as president of the International Railway Commission.
In 1897, the Penn’s presidency opened again as a result of an unexpected death, and the board came to Cassatt, almost pleading with him to take the job.
He did, and thus began the most dramatic expansion in the company’s history. Cassatt was responsible for bringing the Penn Railroad line into New York City by doing something that many thought to be impossible – tunneling under the Hudson and East Rivers. He was also responsible for building Penn Station, the largest building in the world built at one time when it was completed.
Sadly, Cassat did not live to see these projects completed in 1910. He died in 1906, falling victim to complications from a childhood disease, sadly contracted from his grandchildren. They had become infected with whooping cough the preceding summer. Cassatt caught it, and, being older, it hit him harder, resulting in multiple health issues. He died at age 67.
Cassatt was the brother of the even more legendary impressionist artist, Mary Cassatt.
The sponsor of the USS A. J. Cassat was his widow, Mrs. A. J. Cassatt, presumably in line to christen the ship and lend emotional support to its crew as the sponsor. It seems possible that she may have been a benefactor of the ship as well, to secure naming rights.
But then, less than a month after the A. J. Cassat was launched, the U.S. Navy purchased the ship for its Liberty fleet, immediately changing its name to the Appanoose County.
Although there are no obvious connections between Cassatt and Appanoose County, railroads were an important part of Cassatt’s life and Appanoose County's history. Two major lines built tracks through the county, probably attracted by the county’s booming coal mining industry during its early years. Also, a train dropping off a passenger in Centerville makes an appearance in a 1921 silent movie of some small note, The Wonderful Thing, starring Norma Talmadge.
Not to be outdone by Cassatt’s success in Triple Crown horse racing competition, Mack Garner, a native of Centerville, was the jockey on Cavalcade, the horse that won the 1934 Kentucky Derby.
The USS Appanoose County served the Navy in 1944 and ’45 until the end of the war. She was then decommissioned, turned over to the War Shipping Administration, and renamed, once again: the USS A. J. Cassatt.
Operating as a commercial ship, she was sold several times over the ensuing years and underwent another name change to USS Santa Ana. She lost a propeller in 1964 on the way from Japan to Portland, Oregon. She ended up in control of the Japanese and was scrapped.
Sources: Navy commissions its newest submarine, the USS Iowa, Nicholas Slayton, T ask & Purpose, April 6, 20254, taskandpurpose.com; Liberty ship, wikipedia.org; Alexander Johnston Cassatt: The Man Whoi Spoanned the Hudson, Steven Ujifusa, May 29, 2013, https://blog.phillyhistory.org; United Staters Maritime Commission, wikipedia.org; Appanoose (AK-226), history.navy.mil/research; A. J. Cassatt, List of Liberty ships (A), wikipedia.org; The New York Times, December 29, 1906, Pages 1 and 2, various news articles (unby-lined) regarding A.J. Cassatt, his life and death the preceding day; SS A. J. Cassatt.PDF, Bud Shortridge, Google Docs, docs.google.com; Appanoose County Historical and Coal Mining Museum, appanoosehistory.com/blog.
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