Below Sea Level and Ultimately Shining - "I Need a Hero" - THIS IS ABOUT THE VERY FIRST SUBMARINE "The Holland" BUILT IN NEW SUFFOLK

By Dan McCarthy

Let’s dive right in. The focus is on a monumental and earth shattering invention that originated right in a local hamlet in the Town of Southold. We’ll take a trip to a period of days in our past that saw outstanding achievement and brilliance. It’s just about the turn of the 20th century and things were about to change forever.

John P. Holland was an Irish-born teacher and engineer. He was the inventor of different kinds of boats. He developed the first submersible vessel to be formally commissioned by the U.S. Navy. Let’s cut to the surface. Elizabethport, New Jersey, was where John Holland started construction of his sixth submarine, which was christened Holland (or Holland VI). Construction was finished in 1898 and was followed by a two-year period of trials.

In 1899, New Suffolk residents saw something unusual: what looked like two masts moving through the water at about five knots. There was no boat, no engines and no smoke. The masts belonged to the country’s first submarine launched from an unlikely spot — the hamlet of New Suffolk — where the J. P. Holland Torpedo Company became its principal industry until 1905.

The Holland was powered by a 50-horsepower electric motor. Batteries propelled the electric motor. The Holland had one torpedo tube and about five feet of clearance for the crew of six to stand. It was 53 feet long with a 10-foot beam. There was a little extra headroom by the hatch and that was where the captain stood. The crew compartment was referred to as a “crawl-in.”

The Holland underwent a test on the Potomac in 1900 witnessed by Admiral George Dewey and on April 11, 1900, the U.S.S. Holland was accepted into the fleet becoming the U.S. Navy’s first submarine. April 11 is celebrated to this day as National Submarine Day. Did you know that American Red Cross founder, Clara Barton, was a passenger on the Holland on one of its trial runs?

Here is a rundown of some Holland activity as taken from notes from the Long Island Traveler: In June of 1899, The Holland came up in tow of the steam barge Columbia all the way from New York Harbor to New Suffolk and then headed to Greenport where she was to make her headquarters during the summer. The experimenting grounds were in Noyac Bay, west of Island. Members of the crew had strict orders not to allow any visitors on board. Many pairs of curious eyes gazed at the strange craft. She was not more than three feet high and was shaped much like a modern torpedo. She had two flagpoles. An awning was stretched between the flagpoles. On her narrow deck sat two of her crew comfortably reclining in chairs. They were reclining so carefree that it looked as if they would be tossed overboard by the least motion. Capt. Arthur MacCarter of Greenport piloted the vessel. The Holland was not to dive for several days, as she was to have considerable overhauling before being ready to operate in those waters.

In September 1899, the Holland submarine lost a $3,000 torpedo in a trial firing. The missile went all right for 50 feet and then went down and buried itself in the mud under five fathoms of water. Attempts to recover the torpedo were held up by a heavy gale.

Baymen were searching the shores for a lost Holland torpedo in October 1899 when a diver discovered a hole in the mud where the missile had buried itself during a test and it was believed that the torpedo had worked itself free and drifted away. A $50 was offered for its .

The October 13, 1899 Traveler read that the Holland submarine made several trial dives. “Herr Wellenkamp (constructor for the German navy) and Baron Von Patschwitz (naval attaché at the German embassy) watched the trials with evident interest.”

According to the October 22, 1899 Traveler, the crew of the Holland submarine had a narrow escape when a leaking gas tank filled the boat with fumes. The submarine came into her dock after a trial run and was apparently all right. Some old salts on pier became alarmed when nobody appeared on deck so they went to open the hatch. Six men were discovered to be unconscious but were soon revived.

In November of 1899, the Holland submarine passed her official tests before officers of the U.S. Navy. All expressed much enthusiasm on the way the boat performed. The Holland was to leave New Suffolk for Greenport and then to go to Washington, D.C.

An item in the April 1900 Traveler read that since the Holland had been tested at New Suffolk the previous summer and was accepted by the Navy, contracts were being negotiated to build several more submarines.

With the exception of four months at Newport, Rhode Island in mid 1901, the Holland primarily operated in the Chesapeake Bay area on training and developmental duty for the rest of the decade, based initially at Annapolis and after 1905, at Norfolk, Virginia. By 1910, the Holland was obsolete and decommissioned on November 21 of that year. She was sold for scrap in June 1913.

Mysteriously in 1921, Frank J. Burke of the Bronx sent The N.Y. Sun a picture of his wife with the Holland in the background on dry land. At the time, the craft was on exhibit at Starlight Park in the Bronx. Mr. Burke said the Holland “then was a center of interest, something like the Statue of Liberty and the Singer Building.” According to an April 12, 1948 N.Y. Sun article, Austin Flint Gibbons and his father, Dr. Peter J. Gibbons, tried to save the Holland from a scrap metal heap and the submarine was bought for scrap by Henry A. Hitner’s Sons Company of Philadelphia. Hitner sent The Sun a photograph of the vessel taken outside a Philadelphia commercial museum. His firm subsequently sold the submarine and it was sent to the Million Dollar Pier in Atlantic City where it became an exhibit. After that he lost .

The last building to survive from the days when the Holland submarine was tested in New Suffolk collapsed during Hurricane Gloria in September 1985.

In June 2008 the Peconic Land Trust purchased 3.5 acres of a New Suffolk site to end 25 years of development plans. This is where the world’s first submarine base, operated by the Holland Company until 1905, was located. In 1899, Goldsmith & Tuthill Shipyard sold the north section of their of the shipyard to the Holland Company with the stipulation that they could buy back the land if Holland moved. When the Holland Company, by then the Electric Boat Company, began building larger submersibles, the water depth at New Suffolk was no longer adequate. Goldsmith & Tuthill repurchased the land about 1905, and Electric Boat Company moved to Connecticut.

Ruth Houston, formerly Ruth Tuthill, married her husband Floyd Houston in January of 1946. She was a volunteer in the Civil Defense and he was the county director. He was also president of the U.S. Navy League, Suffolk County Council. For 10 years Mrs. Houston ran the family business of Goldsmith & Tuthill as the fourth generation in a direct line of descent from Ira Brewster Tuthill. After their marriage, Floyd Houston joined the management of the family business. Coal had dropped so there was no point in continuing the coal business. Within a year, Goldsmith & Tuthill had purchased a small fuel oil business in addition to other holdings. The oil business was built up to well over a million gallons a year. Ruth and her husband Floyd Houston sold the Goldsmith & Tuthill Oil Company in 1976 after the small business empire had existed in Southold for over 130 years.

There was no limit for Floyd Houston. He was a member of the Cutchogue-New Suffolk Historic Council. He had an interest in astronomy and built a New Suffolk Observatory in 1954. Mr. Houston had constructed a six-inch reflector that would keep an observed star in view as the earth turned. A trap door to the center of the floor gave access to a seismograph pit where a sensitive pendulum and electronic equipment were kept. Mr. Houston did most of the structural work of the building and his cabinet-making technique made the patterns for the heavy castings of the big telescope that was mounted within.

Floyd Houston, known familiarly as “Mr. Navy League,” had remarkable skill at cabinet-making. In his home was everything from hi-fi cabinets to a faithful reproduction of a mid-18th century American Chippendale serpentine-front desk. His greatest recognition came from model-making. He devoted 140 hours of meticulous labor to building two 13-inch-long models of the U.S.S. Holland. The models’ hulls and superstructures were made from white pine. “Conning towers and diving and steering rudders (were) made from six ounce sheet copper.” The decks were equipped with proper fittings — all to scale — including cleats, steering wheels, whistles “and hawse pipes.” The deck gratings were made from copper. The innumerable tiny holes being drilled out one by one by hand. The finish differed on the two boats. One was painted gray and the other had a gray topside and black hull. In 1957, he presented the Mariners Museum at Newport News, Virginia with one of the models and the other model to the Whitaker Historical Collection, which had provided him with the material he needed, including photographs, plans, stories, and more to build the models.

Through a shared arrangement with the Southold Historical Society, this wonderful gift has been at the Horton Point Lighthouse Museum and the remainder of the year it can be viewed at the Southold Free Library.

There is a wooden model made by the Holland Company located in the Carriage House on the Village Green in Cutchogue. Bob Smith reported in his “Spreading Chestnut Tree” Traveler column dated January 5, 1957: “It is about eight feet long and weighs as much as the equivalent length of a telephone pole. Slots and cavities were cut into it. Perhaps it was a towing model, the slots and such holding ballast so that the makers could see how it behaved before they built the full model ship.”

To pay tribute to the remarkable history of the USS Holland, the Cutchogue-New Suffolk Historical Society erected a roadside marker located at the end of Main Street; a plaque was placed on the waterfront property on Peconic Bay down from the New Suffolk post office at the submarine base landmark to honor the 100th birthday celebration of the USS Holland in April 2000; and beginning with the intersection on Route 25 and New Suffolk Road in Cutchogue and ending with its intersection at New Suffolk Avenue and Route 25 in Mattituck are two identical signs revealing that the road has been designated as the United States Submarine Veterans Memorial Highway.