Two shipyards were established on the canal. They poured millions of dollars into New Orleans. The tremendous tonnage built in the United States during the war, and the slump in foreign trade that followed the armistice, due to financial conditions abroad, have caused many shipyards throughout the United States to close down, among them one of these at New Orleans. The other one is now finishing its war contracts, and will be more or less inactive until the demands of the American Merchant Marine and business in general open up again. If they are not used for shipbuilding, they can be used for ship repairing or building barges. And it is obvious that the same conditions that made ship building an economic possibility, will encourage other industrial production, especially production that requires the co-ordination of river, rail and maritime facilities. The Canal means millions of new money to New Orleans, as its proponents said it would. On March 12, the authorization of the Capital Issues Committee was given. On March 15, the George W. Goethals Company, Inc., was retained as consulting engineers on the big job. The services of this company were secured as much for its engineering skill, proven by its work on the Panama Canal, as for the prestige of its name. The Goethals Company, co-operating with the engineers of the Dock Board, which did the work, designed the famous lock and directed the entire job. George M. Wells, vice-president of the firm, was put in active charge of the work. General Goethals made occasional visits of supervision. The dirt began to fly on June 6, 1918. Before coming to New Orleans to take up his work, Mr. Wells, acting upon instructions of the Dock Board, called at the office of the Foundation Company in New York, whose engineer had already studied the possibilities of establishing a shipyard on the canal, and guaranteed an outlet to the sea by the time its vessels should be finished. The river end of the site chosen for the canal consisted of low and flat meadow land. There were a few houses helter-skeltered about, like blocks in a nursery, but the principal signs of human life were the cows that grazed where the grazing was good, and sought refuge from the noonday beams of the sun under the occasional oaks that had strayed out into the open and didn't know how to get back. The middle of the site--several miles in extent--was a gray cypress swamp, with five or six hundred trees to the acre, and always awash. The lake end was "trembling prairie" marsh land subject to tidal overflow and very soft. [Illustration: N. O. ARMY SUPPLY BASE] [Illustration: BUILDING LAKE ENTRANCE] With dredges, spades, mechanical excavators, piledrivers and dynamite the work opened.