Weyerhaeuser: James J. Hill's 900,000 Acres and the Dusky Gopher Frog Case

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In 1900 Frederick Weyerhaeuser, already a wealthy Mississippi River lumberman, moved west to Tacoma, Washington and with 15 partners founded the Weyerhaeuser Timber Company. Its first deal bought 900,000 acres of Washington timberland from Great Northern Railway magnate James J. Hill, who gained cash for railroad grant land and decades of lumber freight. The company opened the world's largest sawmill in Longview in 1929, just as the Great Depression killed demand for lumber, and survived by opening a Longview pulp mill in 1931 for recession-resistant paper and packaging. It dropped "Timber" from its name in 1959, built its first bleached kraft pulp mill in Canada in 1965, and in 1967 introduced the High Yield Forestry Plan after 30 years of research, treating trees as a 40-year crop.

Flush with cash, Weyerhaeuser drifted into other businesses: in 1975 it bought 3,200 acres and built the new urbanist town of DuPont, Washington, and it added mortgage banking, consulting firms and personal care products. The resulting conglomerate discount led to a long sell-off, including fine paper to Domtar for $3.3 billion in 2006, containerboard and recycling to International Paper for $6 billion in 2008, and homebuilding to TRI Pointe Homes for $2.8 billion. Instead it bought land: MacMillan Bloedel in 1999, Willamette Industries in a 2002 hostile takeover, Longview Timber for $2.65 billion in 2013 and Plum Creek Timber for $8.4 billion in 2016, becoming the largest private timberland owner in the U.S. In 2018 the Supreme Court ruled for Weyerhaeuser against the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, holding that land must be habitable before it can be designated critical habitat for the endangered dusky gopher frog.

• The company owns more than 10 million acres in the U.S. and holds long-term management rights to 14 million acres in Canada.
• The High Yield plan required replanting within a year of harvest, fertilizing, clearing competing brush, thinning and breeding straighter, disease-resistant trees.
• In 2010 Weyerhaeuser became a real estate investment trust, which pays no corporate income tax if it distributes at least 90 percent of taxable income.
• Beyond timber, it leases ridgelines for wind turbines, sells carbon credits and leases land for minerals and gravel.
• In 2016 it moved headquarters from its Federal Way campus to Pioneer Square in Seattle.