Julius Bloedel

Julius Harold Bloedel (born March 4, 1864, Fond du Lac, Wisconsin; died 1957, Washington) moved from Wisconsin to Fairhaven, Washington (later Bellingham) in 1890, where he became president of Fairhaven National Bank. He engaged in several frontier business ventures, including the Samish Lake Lumber and Mill Company, Blue Canyon Coal Mines, and, as mentioned, the Fairhaven National Bank. He partnered and worked closely with the Bellingham pioneers. Although many of these operations folded eventually, Bloedel's financial know-how managed to keep him afloat through a series of boom-and-bust economic trials. In August 1898, he founded the Whatcom Logging Company with fellow frontier businessmen John Joseph Donovan and Peter Larson, which would later become known as the Bloedel-Donovan Lumber Mills. A park with this name exists today in Bellingham, Washington, which sits on the site of Bloedel's first lumber mill, which he dedicated as a park in 1946.

Using his existing operation in Bellingham as collateral, he began acquiring land in Canada, hoping to expand his lumber operation. In 1911, he and two new partners, John Stewart and Patrick Welch, came to Canada and began acquiring large blocks of forests on British Columbia's Vancouver Island. The Bloedel, Stewart and Welch operation eventually overshadowed Bloedel's previous ventures and their Franklin River logging camp soon became one of the world's largest logging operations. Here, in the 1930s, the Canadian logging industry saw its first steel spar and chainsaw. Welch and Stewart were also contractors on the construction of the Pacific Great Eastern Railway, operating with another partner as Foley, Welch & Stewart.

In the fall of 1911, the same year he started his Canadian logging operation, he moved to Seattle, where he lived with his wife, Mina Louise Prentice. He had three children: Prentice, Lawrence, and Charlotte.

In the 1950's Bloedel's company merged with the HR MacMillan Company to form one of the largest forest products companies in the world. MacMillan Bloedel Limited, often called just "Mac-Blo", was eventually taken over by Weyerhaeuser in 2000. Bloedel Hall at the University of Washington in Seattle and Bloedel Conservatory of Queen Elizabeth Park in Vancouver were named for Julius Bloedel. The Bloedel Reserve on Bainbridge Island, WA, was named for Prentice and Virginia Bloedel.

External links

* [http://angel.library.ubc.ca/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/macmillan&CISOPTR=472&REC=3 Portrait of Julius Harold Bloedel, University of British Columbia Library, MacMillan-Bloedel Photograpy Collection]