Columbia River Pilot

Dalby was born in Elk Prairie Township of Jefferson County, Illinois in January 1879. He went to school through the 7th grade. In 1902, he and a brother came to Portland, where a friend set them up for employment with the Shaver Transportation Company, which had tugs and barges on the Columbia River. They signed on as deckhands on the Sarah Dixon, but Dalby rapidly worked his way up, becoming captain of the Sarah Dixon in 1910, later serving as captain on Shaver boats M.F. Henderson and Cascades.

Also in 1910 he married Henrietta Ernestine “Nettie” Hoffman. The couple had a daughter, Kathryn, but later divorced. Henrietta was born in Michigan in 1883 and died in 1967 while living on SW 52nd Ave. in Portland.

After twenty years with the Shaver company, he earned his master’s papers and, in 1922, became a member of the Columbia River Pilots Association, which provides pilots for ships from the month of the river to the head of navigation.  Dalby worked as a pilot until he retired in 1952. On one occasion, he piloted the USS Houston up the river to Portland.

In the late 1930s, he bought a 30-acre farm on Farmington Road, west of Beaverton. He grew flowers & vegetables and traveled through the western United States. In 1943, Dalby married Mabel L. Renfro Larcom, born in Kansas in 1888. She had divorced in 1940 and was working as a clerical at the Oregon Tuberculosis Association at the time of her marriage to Dalby. In 1960, the couple moved to Rose Villa and lived in cottage 144. He died in July 1964 and is buried in Riverview Cemetery. Mabel lived at Rose Villa until her death in 1976.

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