In 1859, 18 year old John Brown Herreshoff of Bristol Rhode Island, accepted his first commission to design and build a yacht. The fact that J.B., as he was known, was blind, having lost his sight at 15, didn’t seem to slow him down. He became known as the “blind boat builder.”

In 1863, J.B. took on space in an old tannery, hired a crew of shipwrights and established what would become the Herreshoff Manufacturing Company. In their first year, they built nine sailing craft, ranging from twenty-two to thirty-five feet long. The business continued to prosper and in 1868, the shop built its first steamer, followed by another in 1870, Seven Brothers, a pioneering fishing steamer. By 1874, J.B.’s yard had built upwards of 250 yachts and boats.

In 1878, J.B. formed a partnerships with his brother Nathanael Greene Herreshoff, seven years his junior. Together they improved the coil boiler designed by their oldest brother, James, and used the improved design in steam torpedo boats which they built for the U.S. Navy, as well as for the navies of Great Britain, Spain, Russia and Peru.

Herreshoff family biographer, Richard V. Simpson writes: Despite his blindness, John Brown Herreshoff was able to build and run a successful boat building business. He had a great capacity for business, and with his younger brother Nat taking over the design work for the company and supervision of the technical aspects concerned with construction, J.B. became completely free to run the business end, at which he excelled. He did the job costing for their boats, an extremely challenging job under the circumstances, but an absolutely amazing feat and testament to his genius, considering that he did all the math and numbers in his head. He was the one to negotiate and close the deals for new boat orders and was also a good manager, keeping up the enthusiasm of his employees. Under the new partnership, the business soared from twenty to thirty employees to over four hundred….

The firm is best remembered for the many sailing yachts designed by Nathanael Herreshoff, including five unbeaten America’s Cup defenders. Nevertheless, J.B. was involved in all aspects of production and construction of the craft built by the company. As noted in his obituary in 1915 in the New York Times, “Although ‘Nat’ was the designer of the Gloriana, Columbia, Vigilant, Navahoe, Colonia, Wasp, Defender and a number of other famous in American yacht racing annals, the construction of none of these ever commenced until their models had met with the John B.’s approval. This co-operation was responsible for the pre-eminent place the Herreshoffs hold among the builders of racing yachts and made it possible to keep the America’s Cup on this side of the Atlantic.“