Higgins Industries

Higgins Industries was the New Orleans boatbuilding company of Andrew Higgins, best known for designing and producing the Higgins boat, the amphibious landing craft designated LCVP that the Allied forces used extensively in the D-Day invasion of Normandy. Its Wikipedia article says the company also built PT boats and the first American airborne lifeboat, and had a subsidiary architectural firm that designed manufacturing buildings, most famously the Michoud Assembly Facility. Before the Second World War it made small shallow-draft boats for the Louisiana marshes, the Eureka boat or Spoonbill, whose propeller sat in a protective tunnel and which was the first design used for a Navy personnel landing craft, the LCP(L). The firm grew from a single plant with fewer than 75 workers to seven plants with more than 20,000 by 1943, and gave rise to Higgins Aircraft, Higgins Engine Co. and Higgins Plastics Corp. Andrew Higgins liquidated the business on 9 November 1945 after labor strife and formed Higgins, Inc. in January 1946 to build pleasure watercraft; that company was sold to New York Ship in 1959.