Wooden Nickels

A 1991 photo shows a logger working with fallen Western hemlock trees at the Weyerhaeuser Snoqualmie Tree Farm. Weyerhaeuser no longer owns the property.

Last spring, the Weyerhaeuser Co. closed its wonderful Pacific Rim Bonsai Collection to the public. The company didn’t say how much it would have cost to keep the bonsai exhibit open, but this move was one more belt-tightening measure blamed on the recession.

Weyerhaeuser had opened the bonsai exhibit at its Federal Way headquarters just 20 years before, as a gift to the people of Washington on the state’s centennial. The company and its environment were very different then. George Weyerhaeuser, a grandson of founder Frederick Weyerhaeuser, still chaired the family’s namesake business, although only the year before, he had been replaced as president by Jack Creighton. Weyerhaeuser was still the nation’s largest private timberland owner, having nearly 10 percent of King County, where its Snoqualmie sawmill had operated since World War I.

But Weyerhaeuser was trying to refashion itself. The company—which Forbes magazine profiled that year in an article entitled “Lost in the Woods”—had been less profitable than its competitors. It started jettisoning non-core businesses it had acquired or developed in the 1960s and 1970s, including financial services and disposable diapers. But it refused to emulate some competitors by unloading timberland in the Northwest.

Now, the company is refashioning itself again. In January, its board of directors announced that the business will morph into a Real Estate Investment Trust, or REIT. Shareholders will vote on the plan at the firm’s April meeting. The news drew relatively little attention, but it could have a major impact on the region. The transformation, which would require the company to channel virtually all of its income back to shareholders, puts pressure on Weyerhaeuser to maintain strong cash flow to pay dividends. A business that has long been considered a good steward of the state’s forests could find itself under pressure to sell land to maintain that flow. 

Even without a change in corporate governance, Weyerhaeuser has become a very different entity from when its bonsai exhibit opened in 1989. It still owns 1 million acres of Washington forest, but since the start of the millennium, Weyerhaeuser has closed its Snoqualmie and Enumclaw mills (the Snoqualmie mill had largely shut down in 1989), and sold its timberlands in King, Pierce and Snohomish counties. It has shifted nearly all its Washington operations to the southwestern corner of the state.

The firm has also unloaded its paper and container board businesses. In 2007, when Weyerhaeuser got

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