A strong pull for many: this family owned and operated business has long history in Alaska.

• Author: Swagel, Will
• Position: Samson Tug and Barge - Company Profile

During the heyday of Alaska's Russian period, the Tsar's colonial headquarters were located in Sitka, and so were the colony's central institutions--church, school and industry. Those headquartering functions have long since passed to Juneau, Anchorage and other Alaska cities. Some of that flavor, though, remains in Sitka with Samson Tug and Barge, a family owned company.

Samson's corporate headquarters sit in a modest building overlooking Sitka's main harbor, but staffers there supervise marine operations stretching from Seattle, Wash., to the new Alaska city of Adak, two-thirds of the way out the Aleutian Chain. They maintain offices in Seattle, Seward, Valdez, Cordova, Dutch Harbor and Kodiak.

Samson provides freight hauling by tugboat and barge on a regular every other-week schedule year-round from Seattle to Sitka, Valdez, Cordova, Seward, Kodiak, King Cove and Dutch Harbor and then back again. The company makes on-demand stops at Adak, and at any number of smaller ports throughout the Gulf of Alaska. Samson also offers easy connection to overseas carriers at the international ports at Dutch Harbor and Seattle. In 2005, Samson handled more than 200,000 tons of freight.

They own two ocean-going tugs, the Samson Mariner and the Powhatan, and they also lease or operate a number of other vessels and barges, depending on business, which may haul huge construction equipment for a new Western Alaska mine or hundreds of containers of frozen or canned fish heading south. Samson moves a lot of U.S. Coast Guard families between stations. The company has 75 permanent employees, but seasonal and contract workers help swell that number.

A SOURDOUGH HISTORY

Since the early 1900s, members of George E. Baggen's family have hauled cargo, first in horse-drawn wagons in Juneau and then from boats. The family prospered with the growth of the Southeast timber industry in post-World War II Alaska. The company worked closely with the Alaska Pulp Corp. mill in Sitka and an APC sawmill in Wrangell, towing enormous floating rafts of hundreds of logs lashed together to feed wood to the two facilities. They also hauled increasing amounts of freight and equipment to the transient and floating logging camps operating up and down the Panhandle.

Baggen, 57, was born into the business in Sitka, a regular passenger on tugboats long before he can even remember. By his teens, Baggen was piloting boats, but that was nothing unusual for a youth in the Southeast of the...