By Mark Rhoads
Frederick Weyerhaeuser was born in Niedersaulheim, Rhine-Hesse in what is now Germany in 1834. He emigrated to Erie, Pennsylvania at the age of 18 in 1852 where he met and married Elisabeth Bladel. The couple moved to Rock Island, Illinois in 1856 where Frederick helped to supervise a sawmill and a timberyard. He was a highly reliable young worker trusted by associates and employers. He once wrote, "The secret lay simply in my will to work. I never watched the clock and never stopped before I had finished what I was working on."
After the financial panic of 1857, money was very scarce in Rock Island. Frederick has saved enough money with his brother-in-law to buy both the sawmill and timberyard. He started to buy logs from the shores of the Mississippi River and also bought additional sawmills.
Weyerhaeuser formed another partnership with his brother-in-law Frederick Denkman called The Weyerhaeuser Company in 1860. In 1865, he built a French Second Empire home at 3052 Tenth Avenue in Rock Island. The Weyerhaeuser home is called "House on the Hill." After Frederick's daughter Apollonia Weyerhaeuser Davis died in 1953, the home was donated to Augustana College. Students now live in apartments upstairs and special college events are held on the main floor. The home is on the National Register of HIstoric Places.
For 35 years, Frederick's primary residence and business headquarters was in Rock Island where he raised his family. He expanded his timber empire by pursasing large tracts of pine land in Wisconsin and expanded to other forests in Minnesota, Idaho, Washington, and Oregon. In 1878, Weyerhaeuser and Denkman formed the Rock Island Timber and Manufacturing Company.
As his business interests expanded in the vast foresting regions of the Pacific Northwest, Frederick bought another home in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1891 where he became a friend and neighbor of James J. Hill, owner of the Northern Pacific Railroad. Hill's railroad had acquired rights to millions of acres of prime timber land from the U.S. government along its right of way. But Hill knew nothing about the timber business. Hill sold three million acres to Weyerhaeuser at bargain rates. By 1900, Weyerhauser personally owned more timberland than any other American.
Weyerhaeuser's social attitudes were democratic for his time. He showed great concern for the welfare of his workers compared to other industrial magnates of the day. As a matter of practical necessity, he realized that forests were a renewable resource that must be protected. In January 1900 Mr. Weyerhaeuser and 15 partners formed The Weyerhaeuser Timber Company and the present-day Weyerhaeuser Corporation dates it founding from that venture. Frederick Weyerhaeuser remained active in the new buisness that moved to the state of Washington and he died in 1914 at the age of 80. Both Weyerhaeuser and Denkman are buried in the beautiful old Chippiannock Cemetery at 2901 12th Street in Rock Island. The cemetery is on the National Register of Historic Places. Today the Weyerhaeuser Corporation owns vast holdings of timberlands in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Uruguay. The company employs 54,000 people in 18 countries and offers many forest product lines with annual sales of $22 billion.
