1915 was a big year on Lake Union. The Lake Washington Ship Canal and the Chittenden Locks were about to connect the lakes and northern Seattle with Puget Sound and the Pacific Ocean. Activity on and around the lake had increased in anticipation of the opening of the waterway: the Fishermen’s Terminal was open for business on the west side of the canal, William Boeing was constructing his first seaplane in a boathouse on the Portage Cut, and a veteran tug skipper named Cap Webster founded Fremont Tugboat on the east side of the lake.
This development had been predicted as early as 1854, when Thomas Mercer, one of the first Seattle commissioners, gave a rousing Fourth of July speech on the south shore of the lake that he suggested be called “Lake Union” for its position between Lake Washington and the sea. Within a few years, the south shore of the lake became a major industrial center, first for milling lumber floated in from the forests to the east of Seattle. In the 1870’s there was even a short-lived boom in coal that was mined in south King county and transported to saltwater docks by wagon, barge and the first rail line in the North-west.
So Webster hoped to capitalize on the growth of the lumber business, new shipyards, and the increase in marine traffic in general. But competition was fierce in the mosquito fleet of small tugs and ferries, and Webster found he could earn additional income by renting space in his moorage to city folk who had discovered the new sport of pleasure boating.
He set up a second business, the Fremont Boat Market, to rent, buy or sell boats of all kinds and was successful enough in the early 1920’s to run for city council in 1928. He sold the boat business to O.H. “Doc” Freeman, the enthusiastic young man who was working for him on evenings and weekends. The Fremont boat business has been in the Freeman family ever since. The Great Depression hit the mills hard and the demand for tug services took a downturn, but Doc kept the company afloat by finding yachts, tugs and launches at bargain prices.
He would repair them for his own use or to sell; as well as selling boats on consignment. As the economy improved, he opened his own boat yard and built some fine motor yachts. In 1938, he purchased the moorage and the old car ferry Airline and turned it into a floating office, shop, and home for his growing family.
WW II brought new naval construction to shipyards like Lake Union Dry Dock, where wooden minesweepers were built. There was more work for tugboats, but the US Coast Guard commandeered the Airline for a barracks in 1942. The family packed up and moved into a two-story fish-buying barge for the next five years.
After the war, Doc attended all the auctions and became a dealer in war surplus boats including minesweepers, tugs, landing craft, launches, and lifeboats by the dozen. By 1947, he could afford to erect a new building onshore at his moorage with room for his chandlery business on the ground floor and the family on the second floor. Mark Freeman grew up here in the shadow of the Aurora bridge and was at home on the water from an early age. (The chandlery was sold to the employees in 1952 but kept the name “Doc Freeman’s” and had a loyal following until it ran into financial troubles and was declared bankrupt in 2003.)
By then, Mark Freeman was well on his way to becoming an expert boat handler. In 1949, when he was 13, he bought his first workboat for $99. It was a small ex-Navy dory he called the Seal Rock that he soon paid for by salvaging logs around Lake Washington. At 16, he was ready to move up to a bigger boat, so he found a 36′ surplus landing barge, with steel plating over a plywood hull. It had a powerful 6-71 GM diesel, so Mark fitted a special tow bitt and called it the Jerkmore. Working alone, he went after bigger logs, did occasional towing jobs, and paid off the $2,500 cost within a year.
Mark attended the U of W for 1½ years, where he got “an A in sailing,” he says with a smile. When his draft notice came, he naturally chose the U.S. Coast Guard and was posted to Grays Harbor 1955-59. He saw plenty of action at the Westport station and quickly qualified as a “boat runner.” He was promoted to the rank of Boatswain’s Mate after he led the rescue of the crew of the Liberty ship S.S. Seagate after it struck the Sonora Reef.
Mark saved a total of 37 lives in his Coast Guard career, both sport and commercial fishermen. (He belatedly received a CG medal for the Liberty ship rescue in the mail–44 years later!) He wasted no time on his return to civilian life; he bought the Fremont Boat business in 1959 only three years before his father’s death. It was popularly referred to as the “boat lot” and was regularly packed on the weekend with would-be boaters inspecting as many as 80 boats for sale—“from $25 rowboats to $100,000 freighters up to 180′ long,” as one newspaper reported.
He readily admitted he soon grew tired of the boat brokerage business and longed to get back on a tug. After four years, he finally accepted he was not cut out to be a salesman, sold most of the inventory, and turned the property into a private moorage. He devoted himself to towboating full-time and eventually separated the moorage and tug businesses. He took after his father in keeping his overhead down while building a small fleet with older tugs —many of them wood and most past their prime. Of the many boats he owned, he recalled a couple: the 45′ wooden Manila built in 1913 with a 60 hp Atlas that he re-powered with a 140 hp gas engine and later a 6-71 GM diesel, and the 45′ Standfast, a WW II steel army tug he bought in 1972.
“Then I got a lucky break when I won second place in the lottery,” he recalled when I visited the moorage in 1994. “They took half my money in tax, but I spent the other $25,000 plus my savings and a loan from my mother to buy the 65′ wooden Sovereign. we’d never have got her otherwise. She had been re-powered with a surplus navy propulsion system of four 200 hp Jimmies, two on each shaft. So when the big crab boats started arriving here from the Gulf Coast in the 1980’s, we had a boat with some power to spare to move them around.”
In 1990, Mark took another risk , this time on an oversize seine skiff originally built for the University of Washington. It was around 50% bigger than normal, to test an experimental offshore fishing net, and he reckoned it would make a great addition to his fleet. The 24′ X 12′ Spitfire was a real ugly duckling: slab-sided, blunt-bowed and completely open to the weather. But it became the go-to small boat that he began calling his “portable bow thruster.”
In 1995, he sold the business to his son Erik and high-school pal Tom Bulson, but he remained active in the business for the next decade. When Mark spotted another big skiff in Everett in 1997, they bought it into the fleet and renamed it the Stinger. It too was a success and spent two years in Siberia on a charter. Eventually, the 20′ X 14′ aluminum hull began to corrode badly– Tom scrapped it but saved the engine and driveline for future use.
By the early 2000’s, Mark, Erik and Tom all agreed it was past time they stopped standing out in all weathers in the small tugs–the replacement would need a wheelhouse or they would build one. The young partners proudly followed the Freeman tradition of finding vintage boats and upgrading them. Besides being a captain, Tom Bulson is a very skilled mechanic, equally capable in metal, woodwork, and all the systems found on a workboat. His talents have been essential to accomplish the extensive re-builds they have undertaken and stay within their budget.
In 2014, they found a vintage 32′ tug with a 300 hp GM 8V92 and a 49” wheel that they re-named Yankee. Tom built It a new aluminum house to replacec the old wooden one, and seems—at least for the moment–to have completed the evolution from the Spitfire to a more capable and comfortable small partner to the company’s big boat, the 51′ Dixie.
Saving the Dixie for the Long Haul
Tom explained that there was absolutely nothing in their price range available in the NW in 2003 to replace the old Sovereign until he located the 51′ Dixie in Ketchikan. He planned to run it down to Seattle for a complete makeover, but then he found the hull needed extensive steel work, although the engine, a 575-hp Cummins VTA 1710 had recently been re-built. So he bought the boat and barged it back to Seattle.
There, they found everything in the engine room except the main engine needed to be replaced, including the shaft, and the 58-inch propeller. In addition, the deckhouse was in such bad shape Tom gutted it down to the frames and skinned it with treated plywood, to save weight. Then he added a 2′ aft extension to the wheelhouse to enclose the external entry ladder and make it more livable.
Tom finished up by paneling the walls and ceiling and installing all the electronics from the Sovereign and its modern Danforth compass. This was the biggest project Fremont had ever undertaken, but the Dixie has rewarded the huge effort with 12 years of faithful service and looks set for quite a few more.
Today, the Fremont fleet consists of nine tugs, ranging in size from the 15 foot, 135 hp Jeep to the 51 foot, 575 hp Dixie–able to move anything from pontoons and houseboats to large trawlers and small freighters. Most of them are the traditional single-screw type that demand an experienced hand on the helm and are considered outmoded and under-powered by modern standards. However, Fremont still gets the job done with the minimum of fuss, as I saw when I rode along with Tom and deckhand Richie Borneman on a blustery day in November.
We had no difficulty tying on at the bow of the 180′ Bering Sea crabber/processor FV Courageous in the Ship Canal. The wind was gusting to 30 knots with Erik confidently handling the stern in the Yankee as they turned the ship around and returned it to the dock. (Interestingly, Courageous is even older than the Fremont tugs: it was built in 1943 in Duluth, Minnesota as a Coast Guard 180′ buoy tender with an icebreaker hull!)
The next job later in the week was definitely not routine: assisting Global Diving & Salvage in the clean up of a big November 1 fire in a moorage just across the lake. After the divers had raised four large motor yachts and pumped them out, Erik and Tom towed them to a dock where they were lifted out and demolished. (In the past, Fremont was often the first responder to lakeside emergencies.)
Around 90 percent of Fremont’s work is still done inside the Ballard locks, where the fishing industry provides the bulk of their work; there are also small ships, barges and houseboats to be moved. But there are still no scheduled runs, the partners confirmed–many days they are literally waiting for the phone to ring. That means long hours and short vacations for the partners, who are competing with the big outfits with full staffs for the ship-handling work.
“One of our selling points is we can be at work ten minutes after we get a call,” Erik pointed out. With service that available, even the giant Foss company is a customer, often calling on Fremont to move boats out of their own dry docks! As long as they can keep this company spirit alive, there should be a demand for their service, and there will be a place for this iconic company on Lake Union.
Mark Freeman Maritime Museum
Mark is now 81 and still lives with his wife Margie in a houseboat near the Aurora Bridge. He continues to curate his personal maritime museum in the company offices. Here, all the walls are filled from floor to ceiling with framed photos of the company’s boats, vintage tugs and ships, with tens of thousands more on file.
There are also over a hundred models, many made by Mark, plus antique engines, nameboards etc—the whole constituting what is likely the Northwest’s largest collection of tug memorabilia. “My goal for the museum is to enjoy it every time I’m here, and then pass it to my family,” he says.
He also uses his contemporary photo collection to make customized calendars for customers with multiple vessels, featuring only their boats–a tradition he began well before the digital era. “This is all we do in the way of publicity,” he says. “But if your names on the wall, next to the phone, then they are going to call you!”
When I asked how he saw the future for the lake, he replied with emotion: “Boats are what made this town–now they want to turn the lake into a park. The fishing fleet spends millions of dollars every winter in the community and the City of Seattle’s Master Plan designates Lake Union a working port, but look what’s happening to it!”
His personal favorite in the fleet is the restored 65-foot tug Blueberry, built 1941 as a Coast Guard buoy tender with two 165-hp 6-71 Detroit Diesels for power and a small crane for lifting small markers on inland waters. It has done a lot of towing work but is now reserved for chartering out to the Freemans and some specialized marine work.