At the urging of Assistant Secretary of the Navy (and future President of the United States) Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945), the industrialist, financier, and philanthropist Alfred I. DuPont (1864-1935) of Wilmington, Delaware, contracted with the Herreshoff Manufacturing Company at Bristol, Rhode Island, for one of a small group of 60-ton steel-hulled boats built to a naval patrol boat design for private owners with the intention that they would be made available to the U.S. Navy in time of war. Du Pont's boat, with the builder's name Herreshoff No. 306, was completed in 1917.