Friedrich Weyerhaeuser

Friedrich (Frederick) Weyerhäuser (November 21, 1834 in Nieder-Saulheim, Rhenish Hesse – April 4, 1914 in Pasadena, California), also spelt Weyerhaeuser, was a German-American timber mogul and founder of the Weyerhaeuser Company, which owns saw mills, paper factories, and other business enterprises, and large areas of forested land. He is the eighth-richest American of all time, with a net worth of $72.2 billion in 2006 dollars.

Friedrich was one of 11 children of Johann Weyerhäuser and his wife. The family supported itself by working a 15-acre (6.1 ha) farm and a 3-acre (1.2 ha) vineyard near Nieder-Saulheim in the independent Grand Duchy of Hesse. Friedrich started attending the Lutheran school at Nieder-Saulheim when he was 6, and at 8 began helping on the farm. When he was 12, his father died, and Friedrich had to give up most of his studies to help out on the farm. The Revolutions of 1848 in Germany prompted several members of his family to emigrate to western Pennsylvania in the United States. They sent back glowing letters describing the conditions they found.

In 1852, at the age of 17, Weyerhäuser emigrated with a group of his family from Hesse to the United States. They landed in New York City in July and proceeded to Pennsylvania, settling at North East. Frederick went to work for an earlier immigrant in a brewery. After two years, he abandoned the brewing business, because, as he put it, he felt that a brewer “often becomes his own best customer.” He then worked on a farm for a year.

His share of the funds from the sale of the family farm in Germany enabled him to move on further west in search of opportunity, and 1856 found him in Rock Island, Illinois, working on the construction of the Rock Island and Peoria Railroad. After a short time, he entered the sawmill of Mead, Smith and Marsh as a night fireman, quickly moving up to tallyman and then yard manager and salesman. When the company opened a new yard in Coal Valley, he was sent to manage it. Though his yard prospered, the firm got into financial difficulties, and with savings from his salary Frederick bought the business. Thus he began doing business under his own name.

With his brother-in-law, Frederick Denkmann, he formed the Weyerhaeuser-Denkmann Lumber Company and began to acquire interests, including some majority interests, in many other timber companies. He became the central point in what was later called the "Weyerhauser Syndicate," a network of lumber interests, "reputed to have almost a hundred partners, none of whom knew the business of the others," with Weyerhaeuser as the common link. In 1872, he established the Mississippi River Boom and Logging Co., an alliance that handled all the logs that were processed on the Mississippi River. In 1900, Weyerhäuser bought 900,000 acres (3,600 km2) of timberland in the Pacific Northwest from James J. Hill and founded the Weyerhäuser Timber Company. One of the 30 factories in which he held an interest was Potlatch, later Potlatch Corporation. He also owned interests in the Boise Cascade Corporation. The Weyerhaeuser Company is still the world’s largest seller of timber.

In 1906, Weyerhäuser's business concerns entered the public eye when the Interstate Commerce Commission recommended to Congress that the lumber industry be investigated for possible anti-trust violations. Weyerhäuser ignored the resulting attention.

Weyerhäuser married Sarah Elizabeth Bloedel on October 11, 1857. The couple had seven children: John P. Weyerhauser, Elise (Weyerhauser) Bancroft Hill, Margaret (Weyerhauser) Jewett, Apollonia (Weyerhauser) Davis, Charles A. Weyerhauser, Rudolph M. Weyerhauser, and Frederick E. Weyerhauser.

In thanks to his home community, in 1904 he established a music hall in Saulheim.

Weyerhäuser was buried in the family mausoleum in Chippiannock Cemetery in Rock Island, Illinois. Weyerhäuser was inducted into the U.S. Business Hall of Fame in 1978.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Weyerh%C3%A4user

• Frederick's birth and death information are from a biograph of him at https://www.mnopedia.org/person/weyerhaeuser-frederick-1834-1914, which is provided below in its entirety:
  • "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."