John Blodgett was born on July 26, 1860, on a frontier farm on the site of the present village of Hersey, Michigan, United States, the son of Delos A. and Jane Wood Blodgett. His father was well established in logging, sawmill operation, and farming when John was born.
Blodgett received his early education in a school his father had built for the settlement and then attended Todd Seminary in Woodstock, Illinois, and Highland Military Academy in Worcester, Massachussets, from which he graduated in 1876. A short course at a Grand Rapids business school, where he learned to write a check, completed his formal education.
John Blodgett became a lumberman at the age of eighteen while his father was ill. He was then sent to Muskegon to help look after his father's pine-logging and milling interests in the area. Uninformed about the lumber industry, he learned to place his trust in those with specialized knowledge. Within a few years he had assumed chief responsibility for the family enterprises in the Muskegon Valley; in 1885 he also became president of the Muskegon Booming Company, which boomed and sorted all the logs floating down the Muskegon River and was said to be the largest exclusive dealer in saw logs in the world. At the height of the Muskegon operation, Blodgett mills were producing some sixty million board feet of lumber a year. About 1890 Blodgett moved to Grand Rapids, where his father now lived, and made it his residence for the rest of his life. Although Blodgett lands in the Muskegon Valley had been cut over by the early 1890's, Blodgett continued to be actively engaged in business, taking full charge of family affairs several years before his father's death in 1908.
During the 1880's the Blodgett family had acquired some quarter of a million acres of pine lands in the South, mainly in Mississippi; from World War I to about 1934, Blodgett maintained an office in Mobile but did no logging or milling. The stumpage was sold under cutting contracts, Blodgett retaining only the mineral rights on the cut-over lands. Blodgett also acquired forest land in California and Oregon, where a number of companies, of which Blodgett was a leading member, carried on logging and milling operations. Although his lumber interests were extensive, they were modest compared with those of giants in the industry. He had large investments in Grand Rapids, where he was considered the biggest financial figure, and was a director of a number of banks, including the Federal Reserve Bank in Chicago. Blodgett and was chairman of the committee established to work with Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover in standardizing the manufacture and distribution of lumber. He was an advocate of reforestation and was concerned with the problem of forest fires; he himself incurred severe losses in the great Tillamook burn in Oregon in 1933.
Blodgett's civic and philanthropic activities were numerous. He was a founder of the Anti-Tuberculosis Society of Michigan and of the antecedents of the Community Chest and the Chamber of Commerce in Grand Rapids. Long interested in improved health facilities in Grand Rapids, he and his wife gave more than $500, 000 for the erection of the Blodgett Memorial Hospital, which was completed in 1916. Two decades later they made a large gift to the hospital. In 1929 they gave approximately $500, 000 to Vassar, Mrs. Blodgett's alma mater, for a euthenics building, the Minnie Cumnock Blodgett Hall. They also aided the Delos A. Blodgett Home for Children in Grand Rapids and made possible the establishment of Camp Blodgett for children on Lake Michigan. In the year of his death he visited a new sawmill in California; a photograph taken at about that time shows a man who looks much younger than his ninety years. During the last years of his life his son, John Wood Blodgett, Jr. , assumed chief responsibility for the family's business affairs.
John Blodgett was a successful businessman. The businesses in which he played a prominent role included the Blodgett Company, the Wright-Blodgett Company, and the Hill-Davis Company, for all three of which he was either chairman or manager, as well as the Michigan-California Company, of which he was organizer and president.
Blodgett was long active in the Republican party on both the state and national level. From 1900 to 1912 he was a member of the Republican National Committee; he supported Taft for president in 1912. He was acquainted with all the Republican presidents from McKinley to Hoover and was a regular attendant at the national conventions of his party. In his later years he saw public spending as the great political issue.
Blodgett was president of the National Lumber Manufacturers Association in 1922, 1923, and 1930.
Quotes from others about the person
"Blodgett was a generous benefactor who always gave magnanimously for humanitarian causes. " - Gerald R. Ford
In 1895 John Blodgett married Minnie A. Cumnock, a native of Lowell, Massachussets. They had two children.
