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Thea Foss launches the future tugboat firm on the Tacoma waterfront in the summer of 1889.

In the summer of 1889, Thea Foss, a recent immigrant and new bride from Norway, buys the rowboat that launches the Foss Launch Company. She is sitting on the porch of her houseboat on the Tacoma waterfront and buys the boat for five dollars from a fuming, disgruntled, failed fisherman. Thea's husband Andrew Foss, a carpenter, is up in the valley building a shed at the time. Before long, Thea sells this rowboat for $15 and buys two more boats from two more discouraged fishermen. Thea begins renting the boats for 50 cents a day. By the time Andrew returns from his shed-building job with $32, Thea has amassed $41. Thus begins the Foss Launch and Tug Company, now Foss Marine Company. This now Seattle-based tugboat and marine services firm employs 1,000 people and is (in 2003) the largest tugboat enterprise on the West Coast.

Back in 1889, the carpenter returned to his houseboat home to be confronted with Thea's tidy sum. As historian Murray Morgan quips, "Andrew thought a while and decided to build rowboats" (Puget's Sound, p. 260). Before long Andrew and Thea had built or bought 200 boats and rented them to fishermen, duck hunters, picnickers, and workers requiring rides to sawmills inaccessible by land during high tides.

Their first power vessel was the steamer St. Patrick, a vessel that had run aground at the head of Commencement Bay. Andrew built a new hull and transferred the wrecked steamer's engine and boiler to the new craft of the same name. By this time his Norwegian brothers had arrived from Minnesota and joined in the enterprise.

The Fosses then sold the excellent St. Patrick for another steamer, the Lizzie A. As Murray Morgan explains, the Lizzie A was the worst vessel the Fosses ever owned. She was slow and unreliable, despite Andrew's incessant puttering. One day, when Andrew was away, Thea sold the old thing for $500 and a pair of horses.

According to Morgan, Andrew grumbled. But with the proceeds, they purchased a Naphtha-fueled vessel, the Hope. This sturdy vessel provided transportation from ship to shore and back for years to come in the increasingly boat-busy Commencement Bay.

The company did more and more business. Andrew designed boats to "raft booms" (huge Douglas fir logs launched into the bay). These "squat, snub-nosed, round-sterned craft" can still be seen "butting waves on the Sound" wrote Morgan in 1972.

Thea and Andrew's sons Arthur, Weddell, and Henry Foss grew up into the business. During World War I, the Fosses were able to buy into a Seattle tugboat firm, and the Foss Launch and Tug Company became a Seattle concern. According to the firm, "Foss today operates the largest, most modern fleet of tugs on the West Coast and provides a full range of marine transportation services, including Harbor Services, Regional Towing, Environmental Services, Shipyard and Terminal Services" (Foss Website).

Sources:
Murray Morgan, Puget's Sound: A Narrative of Early Tacoma and the Southern Sound (Seattle, University of Washington Press, 1979), 259-262; Foss Maritime Company Website (www.foss.com).

By Priscilla Long, January 11, 2003

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Foss Tugboat No. 12, with barge transporting caisson anchor for Tacoma Narrows Bridge, 1939
Courtesy UW Special Collections (Neg. Civil Engineering 290)