Anchored in La Conner

The history of Dunlap Towing, launched here a century ago, is a special chapter in La Conner lore. And given the company’s recognition of market trends, the future promises equally gripping storylines.

Rooted in barging grain to Seattle at a time when horses were still a familiar part of city traffic, Dunlap Towing today is a multi-faceted maritime firm whose fleet regularly provides barge towing to distant ports, including those in Alaska and Hawaii, among an array of seagoing tasks.

In June, it was a Dunlap vessel, the Gretchen Dunlap, that was the first of three tugs to arrive at the salvage scene of a still-burning car carrier in the North Pacific, south of Adak, Alaska. The Gretchen Dunlap, built in 2015, established a towline to hold in place the stricken Morning Midas, an adrift cargo ship that had caught fire while delivering new vehicles to Mexico.

The 101-foot Gretchen Dunlap, which like the rest of the company’s ocean-going fleet features the latest in navigation gear and communications equipment, offers a stark contrast to the several small tugs and scows acquired by Gene Dunlap when he founded the company in 1925.

That pioneering era in Dunlap Towing history saw the company focus on hauling fish, grain and straw from the Skagit River delta and farms in Skagit Valley and on the La Conner flats to markets and flour mills in Seattle.

Jim Dunlap, the company’s current CEO, board chairman, and nephew of Gene Dunlap, speaks with reverence of the early boatmen who helped Dunlap Towing navigate its formative years. 

One of those was his dad, James Dunlap, who in addition to having been the firm’s long-serving president, was a devoted La Conner civic leader as a member of the town council and school board. 

James Dunlap began getting his sea legs while a schoolboy.

“When dad was only 12 or 13-years-old, they let him steer the boat while the crew rounded up logs,” Jim said.

James Dunlap was on Archie Misner’s crew that made the fish runs to Seattle and worked on the boats until the late 1940s — he skippered the famed Malolo, a 55-footer built in Ballard in 1926 — before moving into the office. In 1963, he became Dunlap Towing’s president when he and other employees purchased the company.

Dunlap Towing’s second 50 years has seen waves of expansion. The company ventured more heavily into log towing, gravel barging, and dry land log handling throughout Puget Sound. In the late 1970s, Dunlap Towing and two partners formed Northland Services, whose specialty became long-haul containerized freight barging.

Dunlap Towing’s more distant destinations have included China, Korea, Russia, the Philippines, and the U.S. Gulf and East Coasts. A humanitarian mission to North Korea, into which a Dunlap tug escorted a food aid shipment to the closed and isolated country, was particularly tense.

“Sometimes, I wonder if Gene and dad thought we’d still be here in a hundred years.”

– Jim Dunlap

“As soon as they entered North Korean waters,” Jim said, “they were met with gunboats.”

The company’s Puget Sound log yards bustled during a period when global buyers sought Northwest timber.

“The export log market was really good for us,” reflected Mit Harlan, a retired Dunlap Towing vice president who, as was the case with Jim Dunlap, began his tenure at the company on the boats.

Through the years, Dunlap Towing has provided living wage jobs in La Conner and routinely sponsored community projects and worthy causes.

In the 1960s, when La Conner’s economy was in doldrums, Dunlap Towing barged the former Bellingham Yacht Club Building to the waterfront here, where it was converted to a restaurant. The rechristened Lighthouse Inn attracted patrons to town from around the region for a fine dining experience.   

The company often drew its workforce from those just out of high school.

“There were some guys,” recalled Harlan, father of recently appointed Dunlap Towing President Mike Harlan, “who said they just needed a short-term job, something for a few months that would let them save up some money, and then they ended up retiring here.”

Gerald Bell, a retired former Dunlap Towing skipper and author of the book “Tugboat Life,” had grown up on a local farm with no maritime experience when he was hired. In his 278-page account of 50 years in tug boating, Bell admits to having “felt like a fish out of water” when he first boarded the Malolo. He said Captain Richard Dalan put him at ease.

“Like a lot of people starting a new job,” Bell wrote, “I had not a clue of what I was supposed to do. When I asked Richard what my tasks were, he said: ‘Enjoy the scenery and you can learn as we go.’”

Dunlap Towing has tapped into numerous La Conner families for multiple generations of employees possessing the unique skill sets required of the tugboat industry.   

While the bulk of Dunlap Towing’s operations are now based in Everett with its deep-water port — and where the company also maintains an industrial hardware outlet — the corporate office remains in La Conner.

“Sometimes,” Jim Dunlap mused, “I wonder if Gene and dad thought we’d still be here in a hundred years.”

There’s no doubt now. Dunlap Towing has shown it’s a company that can take things a century at a time.

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Bill Reynolds is a general assignment reporter who covers Town government, schools, and spot news.