Corvallis resident Dawn Warneking was scrubbing her father’s headstone at Philomath’s Mount Union Cemetery in June 2025 when she struck up a conversation with the cemetery’s sexton. Before it ended, she had posed a question he’d never heard in his time overseeing the grounds: Would they accept a wooden boat?
Caffey described his reaction as “less than stunned, but more than dumbfounded.” Janet Cornelius, chair of the cemetery’s board, happened to be on the grounds.
“We were having just a lovely conversation about the cemetery, and this kind of came out of the blue,” he said. “Luckily, Janet was nearby, and we consulted, and of course, yes, that would be a wonderful thing to do.”
Sixteen months later, the boat — a 12-foot Catspaw dinghy named Beau that Fred Anderson built by hand in his Corvallis garage in the mid-1990s — is headed for a new life on Puget Sound. Caffey said a couple with homes in Yachats and Gig Harbor, Washington, bought it Oct. 7 for $3,000 to serve as the tender for their 47-foot motor yacht.
The money goes to the all-volunteer Mount Union Cemetery Association, where it will help pay for maintenance and headstones for unmarked graves.
“His boat is going to be in the water,” Warneking said during an Oct. 19 visit to the cemetery. “Dad would be just pleased as punch.”
An engineer with a dream
Fred Anderson was a civil engineer who grew up in Ohio listening to stories from a great-uncle, Jim Anderson, who had headed north to Alaska in a homemade boat in the early 1900s and worked in a Juneau gold mine.
“He planted a lot of fertile seed in my dad’s mind about Alaska and boats and adventure,” Warneking said.
Anderson made it to Alaska himself in 1970, working for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on the Snettisham hydropower project near Juneau and later managing the Corps’ materials branch in Anchorage. He went on to federal construction and mining safety work in Washington, D.C., including with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and became an expert in tunnel safety.
The stress of that job sent him looking for an outlet. He spent summers at the WoodenBoat School in Brooklin, Maine, learning the craft from master builder Gordon “Swifty” Swift. A Friendship sloop he helped build there, designed by Joel White, is still used as a sailing trainer at the school. White also designed the Catspaw dinghy — and was the son of E.B. White, author of “Charlotte’s Web.”
Anderson and his wife, Maxine, retired to Corvallis to be near their daughter, moving into a house he designed in the Timberhill area on July 4, 1993. The farthest bay of the three-car garage was built for boats, facing east for good light.
He built two boats there, a Chaisson dory and then Beau, each taking about a year. Beau, finished around 1995, was the one he used to hone his skills, down to the brass rivets. Warneking and her mother took turns holding the mallet while he hammered them in.
“I’d call him and I’d say, ‘Dad, what’d you do today?’ And he’d say, ‘It was a great day for making sawdust, kid,'” Warneking said. “I would know that there was a really good chance that he was just barely within the noise ordinance every morning.”
The boat, which measures 12 feet 2 inches long with a 4-foot-3-inch beam, took its name from the family’s golden retriever, Beau, who had a bed in the garage and served as shop dog.
The rowboats were practice for something bigger. Anderson dreamed of building a small diesel cruiser to travel the Inside Passage. He bought a keel in British Columbia, hauled it home on a flatbed truck and built a shop in Albany for the project. He had just finished the shop when he was diagnosed with colon cancer. He died June 2, 1998, 12 days before his 60th birthday.
When the family chose a burial site, they visited Mount Union. Anderson loved history and airplanes, and as they walked the grounds, big planes flew overhead on their way to the Hillsboro Air Show.
“Mom said, ‘Oh yeah, this is the spot,'” Warneking recalled.
‘They’re meant to be used’
For years, the boats sat in storage. Beau didn’t touch water until 2023 on a family trip to East Lake in the Newberry Caldera southeast of Bend. Warneking’s husband, Dave, built a trailer so the couple could haul it themselves, and they took it to Clear Lake and to the Port of Toledo Wooden Boat Show, where people admired it but no one bought it. The family had also rowed it on Yaquina Bay.
“We were just storing them,” Warneking said. “They’re meant to be used, and we all agreed about that.”
Her mother, now 87, kept coming back to one idea for a new home — Mount Union, where she already gave money for upkeep. After Warneking’s conversation with Caffey, the family first offered the cemetery the dory, believing Beau might go elsewhere.
Then, at the August 2025 Toledo show, organizers there declined Beau as a donation, saying it was too nice for how they use boats. Warneking came home and called her mother.
“I said, ‘Mom, you got your wish,'” she said.
The cemetery gladly took Beau instead. Over Labor Day weekend 2025, the family rolled it into Caffey’s garage, across the street from the cemetery.
Caffey, who has owned boats himself, figured such a striking boat would sell quickly. He compiled a list of yacht clubs and emailed them a flyer. The boat was also listed on Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace, and Caffey parked it with a sign at the corner near the cemetery on weekends
Winter came and went, then spring. Members of the Newport Yacht Club told him to be patient.
“They said the way people buy boats is they get it in their head the kind of boat they want, and then they sit on it and wait until it comes up,” Caffey said. “They told me this is a unique boat. It might take some time, and they were right.”
The call finally came through Craigslist from a couple in Yachats who asked to see the boat that afternoon. They were driving home to Gig Harbor, and Philomath was on the way. Their current tender, Caffey gathered, was a beat-up inflatable.
“The missus was looking to turn heads as she pulled up to the dock,” he said. “This boat certainly met that need.”
They bought it, hooked it up and towed it away the same day.
The $3,000 price matched the association’s reserve.
“Even though I thought it carried a greater value, honestly, if we lived in Annapolis, I would have laughed at that,” Caffey said. “But since we were in Philomath, that was a good price.”
The proceeds go into the association’s general fund for maintenance and for headstones for unmarked graves, the group’s current project. An Eagle Scout project identified 33 unmarked graves in the cemetery’s old northwest section, and with help from a community grant, the association has placed stones on 20 of them.
The Anderson family’s dory found a home, too. The Oregon Coots, a chapter of the Traditional Small Craft Association, accepted it and raffled it at this year’s Toledo Wooden Boat Show to support boatbuilding programs.
Warneking hopes the story prompts other families to look at what they have.
“You never know when something that you have might be of value,” she said. “Hopefully, other people will say, ‘Huh, we never thought we could do that with Dad’s tractor.’ I’m glad it went to somebody that will use it as it was intended to be used.”
