ST. PAUL, MN - Frederick Weyerhaeuser and the American West, by Judith Koll Healey, is a new biography of Frederick Weyerhaeuser (1834–1914), one of the great industrialists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries and founder of the international timber corporation the Weyerhaeuser Company. The Weyerhaeuser name looms large in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Washington, and Arkansas, attached to paper mills, cabinet factories, and vast tracts of land, both forested and cut over. Frederick Weyerhaeuser, the man who started the lumber empire, significantly shaped the American economy and landscape from Wisconsin westward in the nineteenth century.

A complex and private man, Weyerhaeuser emigrated from Germany in 1852 at the tender age of 18. In just a few years, he would be a prominent lumberman, organizing partnerships among competing companies, rationalizing the business, and then making the largest timberland purchase in the history of the United States.

“Anyone who would understand America’s forests and, indeed, America should read this fascinating book. Frederick Weyerhaeuser is as important a part of America’s forest past and present as Schenck, Pinchot, and Leopold,” praised John C. Gordon, Pinchot Professor Emeritus and former dean, Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.