Weyerhaeuser- Close but No Cigar
Rugged StuffBy R. Keith Rugg, 12-02-08
A German immigrant, Frederick Weyerhaeuser made his start as a night watchman at a sawmill in Rock Island, Illinois, in the 1850s. Courtesy Weyerhaeuser Company.
The trivia question was, What Western family owned-and-operated business that started up in the late 1940s had the tag line, for a time, “Where one tree is cut, another is planted.” ?
All of the submissions (except one big cheater who knew the right answer because it was his business) guessed the same company- Weyerhaeuser, one of the largest timber companies in the world. It wasn’t a bad guess. The biggest strike against Weyerhaeuser being the right answer is the time frame- Frederick Weyerhaeuser, and 15 partners, began the company in 1900, with the purchase of 900,000 acres of timberland in Washington, with headquarters in Tacoma, and a mill in Everett.
It seems that the company was in the forefront of reforestation efforts, and of thinking of timber as a crop to be harvested over and over. This concept of tree farming really picked up in the mid- to late-1930s, and it’s easy to see how a phrase such as the one in the trivia question would bring to mind the timber practices of Weyerhaeuser.
The answer to the question, however, is Rugg’s Christmas Trees. The Rugg family business included for several years our delivering and providing wholesale northern trees (mostly from northwestern Montana) to retail locations in the greater Twin Falls / Buhl area of Idaho. The phrase “Where one tree is cut, another is planted,” was quite literally a tag line, as it was printed on the color-coded tags stapled around the limbs of the trees that identified the tree size.
(Here’s a hint for Rugged Stuff trivia questions- First consideration should always be that it has something to do with me. I lived out in New England for a few years, but had to move back West, and one of the main reasons was that those Eastern states just aren’t large for me to fit my ego into them…)
But many thanks to those who did venture a guess, and I’ll be sending some sort of Rugged Stuff logo prizes out to you (all except Ray Rugg, he gets a big raspberry… I didn’t even know he was out of the backcountry until his e-mail with the answer showed up in my e-mail in-box one day…)
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