Frederick Weyerhaeuser was born Nov. 21, 1834, in the German village of Nieder Saulheim in Hesse.
He was an American lumber entrepreneur who assembled a syndicate owning millions of acres of timberland, as well as sawmills, paper mills, and other processing plants.
An immigrant who left Germany when he was 18, Weyerhaeuser started in the lumber business as a sawmill worker in Rock Island, Ill. After the business failed in the panic of 1857, he decided to buy it. In 1860, he took his brother-in-law, Frederick C.A. Denkmann, as a business partner. While his partner ran their mill, Weyerhaeuser traveled through Wisconsin and Minnesota, buying timber stands. He also began to develop an interest in many logging and milling operations.
In 1872, he organized the Mississippi River Boom and Logging Co., a huge confederation that handled all the logs milled on the Mississippi.
In 1891, Weyerhaeuser moved to St. Paul, Minnesota, where he and his next-door neighbor, railroad tycoon James J. Hill, made one of the biggest land deals in the U.S. history. In 1900, he bought from Hill 900,000 acres of timberland in the Pacific Northwest for $6 an acre, thus founding the Weyerhaeuser Timber Company, centered in Tacoma, Wash.
During his lifetime, the company purchased almost 2,000,000 acres of land in the Pacific Northwest at an average cost of $8.80 an acre. In addition, the Weyerhaeuser syndicate managed his many interests and partnerships in timberland and sawmills in other parts of the United States. Weyerhaeuser never changed the names of firms he controlled, but he was president of 16 lumber companies and a large shareholder. One of the 30 mills he was interested in was the Potlatch, Idaho mill, which would later become Potlatch Corporation. He also owned part of what is now Boise Cascade Corporation.

Weyerhaeuser Timber Co., Camp 2, Walsh Lake, Washington, June 15, 1904 (wikimedia commons)
Weyerhaeuser valued anonymity in his life despite his achievements. A religious individual, he was born into the Lutheran faith and later became Presbyterian. He raised his children in the Presbyterian tradition. As a philanthropist, he donated funds to several organizations, including the Presbyterian House of Hope, Macalester College, the Union Gospel Mission, the Weyerhaeuser Foundation, and other charitable causes.
Frederick Weyerhaeuser died on April 4, 1914, in Pasadena, California.
The Weyerhaeuser Company (as the company was renamed in 1959) is still a world leader in lumber sales.