For Roen Salvage Co., a family-owned Sturgeon Bay marine construction company, 2009 was the best year in the firm’s 61-year history.

Sales last year soared to more than $10 million for the company, which specializes in dredging, pile driving, stone breakwater construction and building offshore structures. In recent years sales have been in the $3- to $8-million range, according to company president John Asher.

Roen Salvage employs 20 people year-round, seven of whom have been with the firm for more than 20 years. The company adds as many as 25 workers during the eight-month construction season.

The firm was founded in 1949 by Asher’s parents, Charles and Hilda Asher, and named for his grandfather, Capt. John Roen of Norway. John Asher became company president in 1985.

“A couple of nice projects came together,” Asher says in reference to 2009. “Some stimulus dollars got out to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.” 

The Corps is Roen’s biggest customer, and it named Roen its “Civil Works Contractor of the Year” for last year.

Among the 2009 projects were the widening and deepening of a berth at Bay Shipbuilding in Sturgeon Bay, rehabilitation of a breakwater at Petoskey, Mich., and dredging at Green Bay, Kewaunee and Menominee, Mich. The company recently was awarded a $5 million contract for rehabilitation of the sheet piling at Duluth harbor.

“With two wars going on at once, a lot of the Army’s money is going overseas,” says Asher. “I wish those wars would end.”  

By John Hill

You can contact John Hill by e-mail at jhoythill@sbcglobal.net.