Frederick Edward Weyerhaeuser was an American lumberman and financier.
Background
Frederick Edward Weyerhaeuser was born in Rock Island, Ill. , the fourth son and youngest of seven children of Frederick Weyerhaeuser and Elizabeth Sarah (Bloedel) Weyerhaeuser. Both parents were born in Niedersaulheim, Germany (fourteen miles southwest of Mainz); the father had come to the United States in 1852 and settled in North East, Pa. , before moving to Rock Island in 1856 and marrying a year later. In 1860 he formed a partnership with his brother-in-law Frederick C. A. Denkmann and bought a sawmill in Rock Island at a foreclosure sale. From operation of this enterprise the two families extended their activities to timberland and saw mill ownership as well as log driving on the Chippewa, St. Croix, upper Mississippi, and St. Louis rivers. On all these streams the elder Weyerhaeuser initiated and became the key figure in extensive joint endeavors with a score of families and partnerships, acting occasionally as chief executive officer of such firms as the Mississippi River Logging Company, Chippewa Logging Company, Chippewa Lumber & Boom Company, Cloquet Lumber Company, Pine Tree Manufacturing Company, Mississippi River Lumber Company, and numerous other land, manufacturing, dam, and boom enterprises. He moved to St. Paul, Minn. , in 1891, where he bought a home adjoining that of James J. Hill, president of the Great Northern Railway Company. In that city, after 1898, he led numerous family groups in investing in timberlands and sawmills located in Louisiana, Arkansas, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington. These ventures were soon represented by such corporations as the Southern Lumber Company, Boise Payette Lumber Company, Potlatch Lumber Company, and Weyerhaeuser Timber Company, their well-known successors being Boise Cascade Corporation, Potlatch Forests, Inc. , and the Weyerhaeuser Company. Into this nexus of joint, often competitive enterprises, coordinated only through the family financial office, Frederick E. Weyerhaeuser moved at age twenty-four.
Education
He had attended public schools in Rock Island, Phillips Academy at Andover, Massachussets, and Yale University, where he won a B. A. degree (1896) and election to Phi Beta Kappa, Skull and Bones, and Delta Kappa Epsilon.
Career
After spending four years learning the various functions of the lumber business through performing them, the budding executive in 1900 became president of Southern Lumber Company, Warren, Ark. There he and others built saw mills, a railroad, and other facilities for manufacturing and marketing lumber. Having had a baptism of practical experience in the field, in 1903 he entered his father's office in St. Paul. He gradually assumed responsibility for the coordination of family investments, as well as the financial supervision of the numerous lumber firms in which the family held an interest, taking complete charge after his father's death in 1914. His brothers-John Philip, Rudolph Michael, and Charles Augustus - played active roles in various manufacturing enterprises. While managing the family office and its associated functions, F. E. Weyerhaeuser engaged in a variety of other activities. Early in his career he instituted an auditing system which resulted in standardized financial reporting and more effective comparative analysis of the performance of the numerous companies with which he was concerned. Noting that many of the family's associated mills competed with each other in the same markets and utilized a variety of wholesaling outlets, he suggested that the wholesaling function be performed by a new, common agency. Beginning informally in 1916, the Weyerhaeuser Sales Company was incorporated three years later. After near destruction by the extreme individualism of mill managers, the corporation became a nationwide wholesaler and remained active until its operations and properties were absorbed by the Weyerhaeuser Company in the 1960's. At various times Weyerhaeuser Sales handled the sawmill products of a score of associated firms in Minnesota, Idaho, Arkansas, and Washington; it contributed to improved marketing of forest products throughout the United States. F. E. Weyerhaeuser participated not only in lumber enterprises but in several other types of business. He held directorships in the Edward Hines Lumber Company, Boise Payette Lumber Company, Northwest Paper Company, Virginia and Rainy Lake Lumber Company, and Weyerhaeuser Timber Company, as well as in the Great Northern Railway Company, the Merchants National and First National banks of St. Paul, and the Illinois Bank and Trust and Continental Illinois National Bank and Trust companies of Chicago. He served as treasurer of the Weyerhaeuser Timber Company, the most important single firm among the Weyerhaeuser associated enterprises, from 1906 to 1928 and as president from 1934 until his death. Civic, charitable, and religious activities also engaged his attention. He was strongly interested in Macalester College for a number of years and headed the St. Paul Community Chest in 1922. He served for twenty-four years on the board of directors of the St. Paul Young Men's Christian Association and for a time as a member of the International Committee of the Y. M. C. A. An elder of the House of Hope Presbyterian Church in St. Paul, he was for a number of years president and a vigorous supporter of the Union Gospel Mission. He died in St. Paul of leukemia at the age of seventy-two, and was buried there in Oakland Cemetery.
Achievements
His most original achievement was the development of the Weyerhaeuser Sales Company.
Connections
Weyerhaeuser had married Harriette Louise Davis, daughter of a prominent lumberman of Saginaw, Mich. , on December 3, 1902; they had three children: Virginia, Frederick, and Charles Davis.
