Weyerhaeuser, Frederick (1834–1914)

Frederick Weyerhaeuser was a prominent, self-made lumber capitalist and millionaire in the Midwest during the Gilded Age. Nicknamed "the Lumber King" and "the Timber King" during a time when lumber ranked alongside iron and the railroads as a source of industry, Weyerhaeuser created a syndicate that controlled millions of acres of timberland. The syndicate also controlled sawmills, paper mills, and processing plants.

Frederick Weyerhaeuser was born on November 21, 1834, in Niedersaulheim, Germany. His family emigrated to the United States in 1852. In 1856, he arrived in Rock Island, Illinois; a year later he married Sarah Elizabeth Bloedel, with whom he eventually had seven children. In 1860, he partnered with his brother-in-law Frederick Carl Augustus Denkmann to purchase a lumber mill in Illinois that had gone bankrupt.

One of Weyerhaeuser's innovative ideas for the logging industry involved log marking. He realized that if a third party marked the logs that were rolled into the river with a unique symbol, timber men working downriver would more easily find their companies’ logs. This system, he predicted, would allow an operator to take out as many logs as he sent down. Before Weyerhaeuser’s idea, mills often lost profits by not getting back the equivalent of the timber they had initially processed.

Part of Weyerhaeuser's talent was his ability to organize large groups of men and implement industrial change. By 1872, he was named president of the Mississippi River Logging Company. He eventually became the president of the Weyerhaeuser Timber Company and other lumber companies, as well as head of the Weyerhaeuser Syndicate.

In 1891, Weyerhaeuser moved his family and business offices to St. Paul, Minnesota. He bought a home at 266 Summit Avenue, close to the mansion of railroad capitalist James J. Hill. As a businessman and industrialist, he used many of Hill's strategies and principles. Like Hill, he located property strategically, invested a low initial amount in development, built conservative financial structures, and, most important, supervised everything in person. He preferred to operate as a one-man holding company and worked to make the lumber industry steady, secure, and profitable.

In 1900, Weyerhaeuser organized the Great Northern Railroad timberland purchase in the West. In this sale, he bought 900,000 acres of James J. Hill's railroad holdings in Washington State for 5.4 million dollars, at an estimated price of six dollars an acre. Afterward, he owned more acres of standing timber than any other American.

In 1906, a muckraking journalist called Weyerhaeuser “richer than Rockefeller” and claimed he had built his fortune by destroying forests and committing fraud. A year later, state congressional investigators studied whether the lumberman (and some of his peers) had violated anti-trust laws. Their findings led to a court order that dissolved his company’s General Paper subsidiary, among others.

Weyerhaeuser denied that his holdings amounted to a monopoly on lumber. Testifying before Congress in 1911, he defended his business practices and insisted that his actions were lawful.

In 2017, the family-run Weyerhaeuser Company is headquartered in Tacoma, Washington, with interests in the Midwest and the Pacific Northwest. It remains a major lumber producer and landowner, and a world leader in lumber sales.

Weyerhaeuser preferred anonymity in his life despite his success. A religious man, he was born Lutheran and became Presbyterian. He raised his children in the Presbyterian faith. As a philanthropist, he donated money to the Presbyterian House of Hope, Macalester College, the Union Gospel Mission, the Weyerhaeuser Foundation, and other charitable causes.

Weyerhaeuser died on April 4, 1914, in Pasadena, California, at the age of seventy-nine. He was buried in the Weyerhaeuser family mausoleum in Chippiannock Cemetery in Rock Island, Illinois. In 1978, he was inducted in the U.S. Business Hall of Fame for his contributions to the lumber industry.