Another of these fabricating yards, whose site was chosen because of its nearness to industrial centers and easy accessibility, was located on an island that was an uninhabitable malarial marsh in September, 1917. It was first taken in hand by sanitary engineers, drained, cleared of mosquitoes and flies and put into sanitary condition. Then the plant, covering 846 acres, was built, its fifty ways extending for a mile and a quarter along the water front and its piers having space for twenty-eight vessels, so that seventy-eight ships could be in course of construction and outfitting at the same time. It had eighty miles of railroad track and 250 buildings of various kinds, including a hospital, a hotel, a Y. M. C. A. building, a cafeteria and a trade school. The yard laid its first keel in five months and launched its first ship in less than eleven months from the date of the first stroke of work on the island marsh. Existing shipyards enlarged their facilities and speeded their work and new ones rushed their ways to completion and began laying keels and driving rivets at the earliest possible moment. In the summer of 1918, 280,000 laborers were engaged on shipyard construction. In a little more than a year 400,000,000 feet of yellow pine lumber for the construction of wood vessels was cut in American forests and transported to shipyards in the Atlantic and Mexican Gulf coastal regions--enough to lay the floor of a bridge twenty-five feet wide from the United States to France. As much more pine and fir lumber was cut for the construction of vessels in Pacific Coast yards. In one month, September, 1918, 15,000,000 feet of yellow pine lumber was used in the building of houses for shipyard workers. On the Great Lakes, when we entered the war, there were fourteen shipyards with seventy-five ways. The signing of the armistice saw twenty-one yards in that region, with 110 ways, and fifteen more ways under construction. These Great Lakes yards, when the Shipping Board took charge of the shipping program in August, 1917, sent at once a fleet of twenty-one steel vessels which had been used in lake commerce down the St. Lawrence for the government’s use on the ocean. Some of them had to be cut in two to enable them to pass the canal locks, and were then welded together again and soon steamed out of the river’s mouth loaded with cargoes.