Lambert and Lambert – bookends on the Saint Paul Port Authority’s 75-year timeline that began on the Mississippi River and recently returned to it. Col. George C. Lambert helped form the Port Authority in 1932 and served as the first president of an organization charged with operating a barge terminal at Childs road, while Chris Lambert today works 4.5 miles upriver in the newest of the Port’s 19 business centers.

Over that span of time, Saint Paul icons like Col. Lambert, Philip Nason, Richmond Warner, Joseph Dillon and George Latimer promoted the Port Authority’s harbor management and later expanded redevelopment activities inland. But in this big town with a small-town familiarity, names are not the only connections. If you look closely the degrees of separation between one turning point in the Port’s history and the next are small.

Take for example, Col. Lambert’s grandson, Richard. (Neither the colonel nor Richard is related to Chris Lambert, by the way.) The passion Dick Lambert developed for the Mississippi over a school break in 1957 evolved into a lifelong love affair with the river. Coincidentally, that was the same year Nason, then president of the First National Bank of Saint Paul and other prominent Twin Cities businessmen successfully lobbied the Minnesota Legislature to expand the Port Authority’s powers to redevelop inland. That opened the door for Port developments like Red Rock, Riverview, Southport, Energy Park, Williams Hill and Westminster Junction, among others.

“My cousin Jack, then general manager of Twin City Barge & Towing, put me on a towboat as a deck hand,” Dick Lambert said. “And after I went back to school, I was the midnight-to-8 a.m. watchman on the harbor.”

Lambert later returned to Twin City Barge and has been involved with river commerce ever since – rising to general manager of Twin City Barge before joining the Minnesota Department of Transportation in 1993. Currently, he heads the department’s Ports and Waterways section.

“Barge transit is inexpensive and environmentally friendly; it doesn’t disrupt the senses, the way other modes of transit do,” Lambert said.  “My grandfather believed that too. That’s why he lobbied Congress to authorize a nine-foot minimum depth channel leading to the Mississippi River lock and dam system from St. Louis to Saint Paul and Minneapolis.” The colonel also helped form the Upper Mississippi Waterway Association, a viable river commerce organization that still exists today.

Likewise, Dick Lambert was deeply involved in the Port’s second river terminal – Red Rock. In fact, Twin City Barge was one of the first tenants of the 371-acre terminal new Pig’s Eye Lake in the late 1960s. The terminal offered the area’s first off-channel fleeting.

“We were looking for a place to build barges,” Lambert recalled, “and the Port Authority proposed we relocate to Red Rock. The Port dredged 4 million cubic yards of sand to help create it.”