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 eighteen. In just a few years, he would be a prominent lumberman, organizing partnerships among competing companies, rationalizing the business,...