Pieces of city's history emerge

The two Marysville projects seem incongruous at best: building a park along Ebey Slough and redesigning the city's logo.

One has to do with making better use of the city's location along the slough and the other with enhancing its identity.

But for anyone who has spent more than a few years in Marysville, the city's identity and the Ebey Slough were once synonymous with Reinell boats.

For more than a half-century, the boat-building company was probably the most famous entity in Marysville. At one time, Reinell was the largest pleasure-boat manufacturer in the country.

"Yes, I would think so," said Art Duborko, Marysville's mayor from 1967 to 1972 and a former Reinell employee.

For decades, Reinell was a big part of the city, with the Reinell plant standing along the east side of the Highway 529 bridge to Everett.

Vestiges of the Reinell legacy have shown up in an unexpected place: the former Cama Beach resort on Camano Island. That site is scheduled to open as a state park in 2006. There's a boathouse there, and inside the boathouse are more than 40 wooden boats, packed in so tightly it's impossible to walk around them. At least three of them are Reinells.

A history of the craft has been compiled by Dennis Conroy and Marlys Jolley of the Center for Wooden Boats in Seattle, which is developing part of Cama Beach as a north campus.

The center's research determined that Reinell had built a 15-foot inboard boat named the Cama Queen for the resort in 1940. In 1951, the resort had Reinell build the Cama Princess I and II, both 15-foot inboard craft. The boats used designs that seem primitive today but were advanced for their time, with a 3-½-horsepower engine in the middle of the hull.

A history of Reinell written by Marty Loken, a marine author, relates how the company was founded in 1928 as Adams & Reinell in Lake Stevens and later moved to Ebey Slough. The firm prided itself on making fine wooden boats of 10 to 18 feet and advertised an ability to build yachts up to 110 feet, Loken wrote.

In the 1930s, C.B. Adams dropped out of the company, and it became known as the Reinell Boat Works, operated by Nick Reinell. The company was known for the uncompromising quality of its materials, the strength of Reinell's fastening methods and the performance of its products, Loken said.

By the 1940s, Reinell had begun to use some marine plywood and began turning to fiberglass, along with most other boat manufacturers, in the 1950s and 1960s.

"Some traditional builders switched to fiberglass, including Reinell," wrote Loken, "but many seemed to lose their spirit and focus after embracing molded-glass boats.

"Reinell's management had bitterly resisted the trend toward fiberglass, but market realities prevailed, and the company's production of fine wooden boats ended without ceremony 10 years after Reinell produced its first tail-finned glass runabout in 1957."

The company continued to prosper for a time, however, and had $26 million in sales in 1973, employing more than 500 people and making a $1.3 million profit.

But the company was sold to new management, and in 1976 was sold again, to William Niemi Jr., the former president of Eddie Bauer.

"Neglect, by management, is the best single word to describe what happened here for three years before I came," he said in 1978.

With widespread quality and management problems, the company began losing money, nearly $3 million a year in its last three years.

On Jan. 18, 1979, Niemi appeared in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Seattle, where Judge Samuel Steiner concluded the company couldn't continue to operate. Its assets were auctioned in February 1980 at a plant it had moved to on 35th Avenue Northeast, with just four boats remaining to be sold.

"Lost in the process were all boat plans, photos, sales and production records, brochures and other evidence of the company's rich 52-year history," Loken wrote.

Anyone who has such materials is being asked to contact the Center for Wooden Boats, 1010 Valley St., Seattle, WA 98109.

The rights to the Reinell name were purchased out of the bankruptcy by a Fremont, Calif., company, Kal Custom Enterprises.

That business remains prosperous, said Wes Nave, the national sales manager. The company is debt-free, owns its own property and produces about 1,400 Reinells a year at a plant in Salem, Ore., selling them through 47 dealers, primarily on the West Coast.

Nave said the company gets continual inquiries from owners of older Reinells, often from the 1970s, looking for help with their boats. Nave said there's not much he can do about such inquiries. "We didn't retain any old information."

Peyton Whitely: 206-464-2259 or pwhitely@seattletimes.com