Friedrich Weyerhäuser

Friedrich Weyerhäuser, also spelled Weyerhaeuser, was a German-American timber businessman known as the timber king of the Northwest. Born in Hesse in 1834, he emigrated to the United States in 1852 and by 1856 was working in Rock Island, Illinois, where he rose from night fireman at a sawmill to yard manager and salesman, and then bought the business himself. With his brother-in-law Frederick Denkmann he formed the Weyerhaeuser-Denkmann Lumber Company and acquired interests in many other timber firms, becoming the link in a network of lumber partners later described as a syndicate. In 1900 he bought 900,000 acres of Pacific Northwest timberland from James J. Hill and founded the Weyerhaeuser Timber Company. He died in 1914.