The Lady B was part of the Bernert family fleet. Here, David Bernert balances on the deck of a tugboat near the Old Oregon City-West Linn Arch Bridge in 1981.
The Willamette Falls Heritage Foundation is looking for a new home for the Lady B, a historic tugboat.
Courtesy photo: Sandy Carter
The Lady B was part of the Bernert family fleet. Here, David Bernert balances on the deck of a tugboat near the Old Oregon City-West Linn Arch Bridge in 1981.
Courtesy photo: Joe Bernert
The Bernert fleet in 1937, located in the Willamette District of West Linn.
The Willamette Falls Heritage Foundation hopes to find a new home for the Lady B, a 75-year-old tugboat that towed logs along the Willamette River between Wilsonville and the mills near Willamette Falls during the mid-20th Century.
The Lady B, a 40-foot steel-hulled vessel was part of the Bernert Family fleet and is now owned by the Bernert family’s business, Wilsonville Concrete.
Over a year ago, Wilsonville Concrete offered the Lady B to the heritage foundation, which hopes to publicly display the boat somewhere along the river. But finding the perfect site has been challenging, and if a new home is not found soon the boat will be scrapped.
“There aren’t very many of these boats that were the real workhorses of the Willamette during the logging era,” heritage foundation member Sandy Carter said.
The foundation hopes for the boat to permanently rest at a publicly viewable location along the river between West Linn and Wilsonville.
Because of the many logs the Lady B tugged to the mills near Willamette Falls, some have expressed that a new home near the falls would be fitting. But the busy industrial nature of that area makes finding a suitable spot difficult, said Carter and her fellow foundation member Jim Edwards.
According to Edwards, both Portland General Electric, which owns most of the land on the West Linn side of the falls, and Willamette Falls Paper Company said they don’t have an appropriate space for the boat.
Bernert Landing along the Willamette River in West Linn’s Willamette Park has been suggested as another location for the boat, but re-homing the boat at the park comes with challenges too.
“I’m doing some exploring about what that would look like for the city,” West Linn Parks and Recreation director Ken Warner said. “I’m talking with the planning department and it looks like it would have to go through land use and go through the formal process for putting a new amenity in a park.”
Without a new home immediately available for the Lady B, the heritage foundation has started looking for a temporary space to store the boat until a permanent location is found.
“We’ve found it challenging to find either,” Edwards said.
Carter said Wilsonville Concrete has been patient with the foundation as it searches for a new home, but it won’t wait forever.
“We’ve gotten a positive reaction from everyone … they want to help,” Edwards said. “But we haven’t found a place or anyone that has a place that’s acceptable right now.”
