Another interesting collection that we have processed at Independence Seaport Museum is the RTC Shipbuilding Company records. The collection covers the shipbuilding and repair history of the company’s work from 1934 to 1965. It contains a great number of design plans and photographs that help document the building process of many ships.
RTC was started by three men, whose initials stand for each letter in RTC. The company was based in Camden, New Jersey, right across the river from Philadelphia. One of the neat things is that you can see the area where RTC operated from outside of the museum. The heaviest building period for RTC occurred during World War II when they built oil barges, tug boats and oil tankers for the United States Navy. For their high quality of workmanship and fast rate of production, RTC received two Army-Navy “E” Pennant four star awards. Not only was this a proud achievement for the company, it also solidified their presence as a major shipbuilding corporation on the Delaware River.
The best part of processing this collection had to be looking at all the images in the “Photographs” series. There are photographs of christenings and launchings, shipbuilding, the employees, company social events and the yard. Out of all the other collections we have worked on, I have never seen such a thorough collection of photographs that cover a wide extent of the supporting paper documents. It is a great benefit for researchers that I’m sure will be taken advantage of.
Another interesting part of this collection are the J.J. Baugean glass negatives of French ship prints. All the glass slides are prints of engravings of various French and European ships from history. They are absolutely beautiful when seen and from some research that I’ve completed, they are also somewhat rare. It is a mystery as to whom they belonged or how they got to RTC. Dates written on their box indicate that the prints were made or purchased in the early 1920s, which is before RTC was created. Our best guess was that the slides were used to make large decorative prints to hang in the RTC offices, but we were just speculating for our own enjoyment!
Overall, the RTC Shipbuilding collection was a great collection to work with and a good candidate for minimal processing. The majority of the collection was foldered when we started, so the bulk of our time was spent arranging the material into series and entering in all the data into Archivists’ Toolkit. With the extra time that we saved, Forrest and I were able to research and analyze the ships more which helped us to have a better understanding of the company and the collection. RTC was a very active company in the shipbuilding and repair industry and I know that this collection will be extremely useful to anyone interested in their work.
