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C. N. Nelson Lumber Co. - Stock Certificate - Friedrich (Frederick) Weyerhäuser did business with this Co.

Inv# LS1000   Stock
C. N. Nelson Lumber Co. - Stock Certificate - Friedrich (Frederick) Weyerhäuser did business with this Co.
State(s): Minnesota
Years: 1885
Color: Black

Minnesota Stock. Signed by Charles N. Nelson as president, owner of the company. Friedrich Weyerhauser did business with this company.

Friedrich (Frederick) Weyerhäuser (November 21, 1834 – April 4, 1914), also spelled Weyerhaeuser, was a German-American timber mogul and founder of the Weyerhaeuser Company, which owns saw mills, paper factories, and other business enterprises, and large areas of forested land. He is the eighth-richest American of all time, with a net worth of $85 billion in 2016 dollars. He was known as the "timber-king of the Northwest."

Friedrich was one of 11 children of Johann Weyerhäuser and his wife. The family supported itself by working a 15-acre (6.1 ha) farm and a 3-acre (1.2 ha) vineyard near Nieder-Saulheim in the independent Grand Duchy of Hesse. Friedrich started attending the Lutheran school at Nieder-Saulheim when he was 6, and at 8 began helping on the farm. When he was 12, his father died, and Friedrich had to give up most of his studies to help out on the farm. The Revolutions of 1848 in Germany prompted several members of his family to emigrate to western Pennsylvania in the United States. They sent back glowing letters describing the conditions they found.

In 1852, at the age of 17, Weyerhäuser emigrated with a group of his family from Hesse to the United States. They landed in New York City in July and proceeded to Pennsylvania, settling at North East. Frederick went to work for an earlier immigrant in a brewery. After two years, he abandoned the brewing business, because, as he put it, he felt that a brewer "often becomes his own best customer." He then worked on a farm for a year.

His share of the funds from the sale of the family farm in Germany enabled him to move on further west in search of opportunity, and 1856 found him in Rock Island, Illinois, working on the construction of the Rock Island and Peoria Railroad. After a short time, he entered the sawmill of Mead, Smith and Marsh as a night fireman, quickly moving up to tallyman and then yard manager and salesman. When the company opened a new yard in Coal Valley, he was sent to manage it. Though his yard prospered, the firm got into financial difficulties, and with savings from his salary Frederick bought the business. Thus he began doing business under his own name.

With his brother-in-law, Frederick Denkmann, he formed the Weyerhaeuser-Denkmann Lumber Company and began to acquire interests, including some majority interests, in many other timber companies. He became the central point in what was later called the "Weyerhauser Syndicate," a network of lumber interests, "reputed to have almost a hundred partners, none of whom knew the business of the others," with Weyerhaeuser as the common link. In 1872, he established the Mississippi River Boom and Logging Co., an alliance that handled all the logs that were processed on the Mississippi River. In 1900, Weyerhäuser bought 900,000 acres (3,600 km2) of timberland in the Pacific Northwest from James J. Hill and founded the Weyerhäuser Timber Company. One of the 30 factories in which he held an interest was Potlatch, later Potlatch Corporation. He also owned interests in the Boise Cascade Corporation. The Weyerhaeuser Company is still the world's largest seller of timber.

In 1906, Weyerhäuser's business concerns entered the public eye when the Interstate Commerce Commission recommended to Congress that the lumber industry be investigated for possible anti-trust violations. Weyerhäuser ignored the resulting attention.

Weyerhäuser married Sarah Elizabeth Bloedel on October 11, 1857. The couple had seven children: John P. Weyerhauser, Elise (Weyerhauser) Bancroft Hill, Margaret (Weyerhauser) Jewett, Apollonia (Weyerhauser) Davis, Charles A. Weyerhauser, Rudolph M. Weyerhauser, and Frederick E. Weyerhauser.

In thanks to his home community, in 1904 he established a music hall in Saulheim.

Weyerhäuser was buried in the family mausoleum in Chippiannock Cemetery in Rock Island, Illinois. Weyerhäuser was inducted into the U.S. Business Hall of Fame in 1978.

Excerpt from History of the Lumber and Forest Industry of the Northwest:

Charles N. Nelson. In a business which has developed so many brainy men and extensive operators, it is a difficult task to single out any one man and proclaim him as exceeding all the rest in acumen and enterprise, or in the extent of his operations. Still, there are, and have been, operators in the lumber world who deserve to be spoken of in a class whose lumbering operations stamp them as pre-eminently entitled to especial notice, by reason of the prominent position which they have held in the lumber fraternity, and in this class we must include Charles N. Nelson of St. Paul and Cloquet, Minnesota.

Mr. Nelson's father, although of English birth, was an officer in the Danish navy, and Mr. Nelson was born in Denmark in 1841. He came to America in 1861, being then but twenty years of age. The

civil war had just broken out, and the martial spirit of his ancestry led him at once to espouse the cause of the country in which he had decided to make his future home, and, enlisting in a Minnesota regiment, he served to the close of the war. Receiving an honorable discharge, he proceeded to Mankato, Minnesota, but soon after was offered a position in the First National Bank of Stillwater, of which Charles Schaefer was president, and obtained rapid promotion to the position of cashier and vice-president, and has for many years been president of the bank, which, but a quarter-century ago, he entered in a supernumerary capacity, and has since classed not only among the wealthier men of the northwest, but among its most astute and able financiers.

Mr. Nelson early began to take an interest in the rapidly developing lumber business of the St. Croix river, and invested his savings in pine timber lands. In 1877 he leased the mill at Lakeland, a few miles south of Stillwater, known as the "Munch" mill, which he continued to operate for a number of years, and finally purchased, and it is still in his possession, or that of the company which bears his name.

In the spring of 1977 the extensive mills of the Schulenburg-Boeckeller Lumber Company at Stillwater were destroyed by fire, leaving the year's heavy stock of logs to be manufactured at other mills, and C. N. Nelson took the contract to saw them at his Lakeland mill, and during the season the firm of C. N. Nelson & Co. was organized, being composed of C. N. Nelson and D. M. Sabin. The new firm now made purchase of the mill property of Seymour, Sabin & Co., and entered into a very much enlarged manufacture of lumber, lath and shingles, both at Lakeland and Stillwater. The company also established a large wholesale and retail lumber yard at St. Paul, building a large planing mill in connection with it, and this they continued to operate until March, 1885, when it was sold to the Bohn Manufacturing Company.

From 1876 Mr. W. P. Allen was general manager of the manufacturing interests of the firm, and has continued with the business to the present day, being for several years vice-president of the incorporated company. In 1879 C. N. Nelson & Co. gave place to the incorporated C. N. Nelson Lumber Co., of which C. N. Nelson was president (an office which he has since retained), M. M. Darr was elected vice-president and treasurer, and P. M. Ranney secretary, and the company extended its operations by the acquirement of a large body of pine lands on the St. Louis river, and the erection of an extensive saw mill at Cloquet, twenty miles from Duluth, on the St. Louis river and on the lines of the St. Paul & Duluth and the Duluth & Winnipeg railroads.

This mill was among the largest which had been erected in the northwest at that time, its capacity being rated at 250,000 feet of lumber, 100,000 shingles and 40,000 lath per day, the product of the year reaching an aggregate of no less than 50,000,000 feet of lumber, 25,000,000 shingles and 8,000,000 lath. In 1889 the Sabin mill was removed from Stillwater and rebuilt at Cloquet on a much larger scale than before, both mills being fitted with the latest improved machinery for the economical manufacture and handling of the product, which was now turned out at the rate of 400,000 feet daily. In 1887 Mr. Darr, who had been connected with the company as vice-president, tendered his resignation, and Mr. Allen was elected to that position, in which he has since continued, in connection with a general management of its logging and manufacturing interests.

In 1892 Mr. Nelson, in behalf of his company, was, after long litigation, awarded a verdict in the supreme court of Minnesota in a case which settled a much-mooted question of the liability of boom companies, much to the satisfaction of the craft at large. The St. Louis River Dalles Improvement Co. had been organized for the purpose of running logs which had been cut upon the St. Louis river. In a heavy freshet, in the spring of 1885, the booms at Cloquet broke, and a large quantity of logs ran through the works of the St. Louis River Dalles Improvement Company into the bay.

Claim was, nevertheless, made by the company for driving fees, which the lower courts allowed, but, Mr. Nelson carrying the case to the supreme court, the claim was there held to be untenable, the court holding that it was the duty of the improvement company to make its works impregnable, so that, under all conditions, logs committed to its care could be held and controlled, so that they could be safely delivered to their owners. The failure of D. M. Sabin and the care and annoyance arising from the loss of logs

above mentioned, combined with a mass of other cares inherent to the vast business of the company, and his own private affairs, had the effect of undermining the health of Mr. Nelson, and he has since spent a considerable portion of his time abroad. In the spring of 1896 the C. N. Nelson Lumber Co. disposed of its mills, together with a remaining 600,000,000 feet of standing timber, and its interests in the village of Cloquet, to Frederick Weyerhaeuser of St. Paul and F. C. Denkmann of Rock Island, Ill., for the consideration of $1,900,000. The C. N. Nelson Lumber Co. still retains the mill property at Lakeland.

Mr. Nelson is still the president and recognized head of the First National Bank of Stillwater, and is a prominent factor in many of the great enterprises for which the brainy men of the northwest are noted. His history is one which can find its parallel in no other country on the face of the globe, and in his progress through a quarter of a century, from a humble private in the ranks of our volunteer army to the head of great industrial manufacture, and with it a bank presidency, is but another illustration of the opportunities which our country affords to any man who has brains to discover and enterprise to seize the opportunity which lies at his hand, and to enjoy the well-merited success which is not restricted to any class or condition. (End of Excerpt from History of the Lumber and Forest Industry of the Northwest). More research is needed, although Socrates Nelson may have been apart of the same family.

More research is needed, although Socrates Nelson may have been apart of the same family.

Socrates Nelson (January 11, 1814 – May 6, 1867) was an American businessman, politician, and pioneer who served one term as a Minnesota state senator from 1859 to 1861. He was involved in the early community of Stillwater, being a founding member of the first Independent Order of Odd Fellows lodge in Minnesota as well one of the earliest members of the Minnesota Historical Society. As a businessman, he was a general store owner, lumberman, and real estate speculator associated with numerous companies in the insurance and rail industries.

In politics, he was involved in the formation of the Minnesota Territory, having co-authored a successful petition to Congress in 1848. He took part in the creation of the Minnesota Democratic Party, held various posts such as county treasurer, territorial auditor, and county commissioner, and was a member of the University of Minnesota's board of regents before being elected to the senate. As a senator, he helped to repeal the Loan Amendment – intended to expedite the creation of railroad infrastructure – from the Minnesota Constitution. He was later elected as a delegate for the 1864 Democratic National Convention.

In 1867, he donated a block of land for what is Minnesota's oldest standing courthouse, and a plaque on the courthouse commemorates Nelson's donation. Nelson died in Stillwater of tuberculosis. The Nelson School, named after him, was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1979.

Socrates Nelson was born in Conway, Massachusetts, on January 11, 1814, to Socrates Nelson and Dorothy Boyden. He lived in nearby Greenfield and attended Deerfield Academy, taking a partial course before returning to his hometown to become a merchant. He moved to Illinois in 1839 on a prospecting tour at age 25 and then to St. Louis, Missouri, in 1840 to sell goods and collect furs. There, he met his future business partner Levi Churchill – married to Elizabeth Marion (née Proctor). In early 1844, he traveled up the Mississippi River to the mouth of the Chippewa River in the Wisconsin Territory and opened a trading post at a site known as Nelson's Landing or Nelson's Point – maintained for several years but since washed away. On October 23, he married Betsey D. Bartlett (born September 6, 1813, also in Conway) in Hennepin, Illinois, who had moved there with her parents after the death of her previous husband.

Later that year, Nelson took a steamboat farther north to the recently settled town of Stillwater and opened its first general store, known as Nelson's Warehouse, and Betsey joined him soon after. With the Churchills remaining temporarily behind in St. Louis, the two parties would exchange goods through the Mississippi River – Nelson's furs for Churchill's merchandise. In 1845, shortly after arriving in Stillwater, Nelson, Churchill, and other early settlers of the area laid claim to large tracts of land near the St. Croix River, which they purchased from the General Land Office in 1849. By the summer of 1847, Nelson was shipping rafts of white pine hundreds of miles downriver to St. Louis, and in the summer of 1848, he and Churchill had together purchased an area of timberland.

On September 22, 1848, the Nelsons had twin girls Emma A. and Ella, but Ella died in infancy on October 23, 1849. That same year, Nelson became a founding member of the Minnesota Historical Society, and on November 1, he was named a corporator of the Minnesota Mutual Fire Insurance Company. Along with state legislator Mahlon Black, Nelson became one of the first two men in Minnesota to be initiated into the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, later co-founding Minnesota Lodge No. 1 in Stillwater in 1852.

Nelson entered the lumber business in earnest on February 7, 1851, as one of the incorporators of the St. Croix Boom Company organized by the Minnesota Territorial Legislature. In 1852, Nelson – along with business associates David B. Loomis and Daniel Mears – platted what is now Bayport. There, they erected a boarding house and a lumber mill, called the S. Nelson Lumber Company. The steam-powered sawmill operated from 1853, the year when Nelson departed from the mercantile business, to November 1858, when the company dissolved, leaving Nelson as its owner. He would operate it scarcely over the next ten years, and it would be rebuilt in 1873 as the St. Croix Lumber Company. In early March 1853, he became one of the corporators of the Louisiana and Minnesota Railroad Company, the St. Paul Fire and Marine Insurance Company, and the Minnesota Western Railroad Company. In 1854, a stock company consisting of Nelson and others published Stillwater's first newspaper, the St. Croix Union – a Democratic-leaning, weekly periodical which was printed until 1857.

Riding a boom in real estate speculation and soaring land prices, Nelson and Churchill deeded 40 acres (0.16 km2) of land in January 1857 to St. Paul real estate salesman Robert F. Slaughter, half of which Slaughter deeded in turn to Hilary B. Hancock. Along with their wives, the four platted the area of nearly 500 lots on June 15, just months before the onset of a worldwide financial crisis known as the Panic of 1857. Amid a collapsing real estate market and with speculation screeching to a halt, the value of the now-platted and mostly unsold land plummeted to practical worthlessness. Months after the Panic began that August, Levi Churchill died in St. Louis on December 24, ceding his estate to Elizabeth. Demoralized by deflated land prices, Slaughter and Hancock forfeited their claim to the lots.

On January 27, 1867, during his twilight months, Nelson became a corporator of the Stillwater & St. Paul Railroad. In early April 1867, hoping to spur development and drive demand for nearby lots they owned, Nelson and Elizabeth Churchill offered to give the city of Stillwater an entire block of land for $5 (equivalent to $93 in 2020) with no strings attached for the construction of a courthouse; the city accepted, and as of 2021, the building is the longest-standing courthouse in Minnesota. Following Nelson's death that May, Betsey, alongside local businessman and court clerk Harvey Wilson (d. November 13, 1876), continued to manage his business affairs, both trustees under Nelson's will. Owing to development sparked by the courthouse, the lots began selling for sometimes upward of $1000 apiece (equivalent to $18,517 in 2020). In 1867, Nelson's estate was valued at over $100,000, (equivalent to $1,850,000 in 2020). By November 1880, this inheritance had been reduced by one-third, and by September 1901, it had plunged to under $1000 (equivalent to $31,100 in 2020) due to extravagant spending by Nelson's son-in-law.

In 1846, Nelson was elected treasurer for St. Croix County, Wisconsin Territory, and in 1847, he was elected treasurer and county commissioner. That year, Nelson was appointed master in chancery for the county by Territorial Governor Henry Dodge. He was one of a seven-man committee whose petition to Congress and its sixty-one signatures at the August 26, 1848, Stillwater convention led to the 1849 establishment of the Minnesota Territory. Later that year, on October 20, 1849, Nelson became a founding member of the Minnesota Democratic Party at a convention held in Saint Paul.

On November 26, 1849, Nelson was elected to serve as treasurer for the newly formed Washington County, Minnesota Territory. He was on the University of Minnesota's first board of regents from February 1851 to February 1859, serving on the building committee which, in May 1856, was assigned to solicit plans for necessary buildings. He served as Minnesota Territorial Auditor under Governor Willis A. Gorman from May 15, 1853, to January 17, 1854, succeeding Abraham Van Vorhes. In 1852, 1855, and 1856, he served as a commissioner for Washington County. In 1858, Nelson organized Baytown Township on the south side of Stillwater. That May, he also named the township of Greenfield just east of Stillwater after his former Massachusetts home, which was later renamed to Grant Township in 1864. On October 4, 1858, Nelson – alongside Charles E. Leonard – was declared the Minnesota Democratic Party's Washington County nomination for state senator.

Nelson served in the Minnesota Senate from 1859 to 1861, elected as a Democrat from the 1st district on October 12, 1858, along with Republican William McKusick. During his term in the 2nd Minnesota Legislature, he served on the Railroad and Railroad Bonds Special Committee and the State Prison Committee. As part of the committee on railroads, Nelson co-authored a report with Lucius K. Stannard on February 4, 1860, recommending the expungement of Article IX Section 10 of the Minnesota Constitution – known as the Loan Amendment. The amendment was introduced in 1858 to expedite the development of railway infrastructure and authorized a total of up to $5 million (equivalent to $144,000,000 in 2020) in loans for railroad companies. Section 10 was expunged soon thereafter during the 1860 presidential election. On March 5, 1860, Nelson was one of five Democrats in the Minnesota Senate to vote in favor of a failed bill – introduced by Charles N. Mackubin – to legalize slavery in Minnesota. On October 12, 1860, the Democratic District Convention met and nominated Nelson for the 2nd district; Republicans nominated Joel K. Reiner, a physician who had previously served the 1st district in the 1st Minnesota Legislature. Reiner won the election held on November 6, 1860, defeating Nelson as part of a string of legislative gains for Minnesota's Republican Party.

Nelson later served on the Stillwater City Council from 1863 to 1865, and in 1864, he was elected as a delegate to the Democratic National Convention, wherein he voted for George B. McClellan.

In 1859 and 1866, Nelson served as the president of the Old Settlers Association, having been one of its charter members. In 1866, he was a trustee for the local society of Christian universalists. At some point later in his life, he came to own an Indian pony mare named Lady Maguire.

Nelson died of tuberculosis in Stillwater on the morning of May 6, 1867, at the age of 53, having been ill for several months and bedridden for several weeks. An obituary in local newspaper The Stillwater Messenger reported the closure of most of the city's businesses that afternoon in observance of his death. Four years later, Emma married attorney Fayette Marsh, a former engineer and chronic alcoholic who had studied law and moved to Stillwater to co-found a firm. They built a house in 1873 and had three children – Ella N., Nelson Orris, and Faith Marsh – before Emma died on November 23, 1880, at age 32 of what was described by her obituary as "a short but painful illness". From 1873–4 until 1876, Betsey continued to manage Nelson's estate while living in the Marsh residence. In 1882, she moved next door, having had disagreements with Fayette over Nelson's estate for years. She died five years after Emma of heart complications on October 8, 1885, at age 72, having been ill for two months prior.

A plaque on the north portico of the Washington County Historic Courthouse commemorates the date when Nelson and Churchill sold the block of land for its construction. Nelson Street, perpendicular to the St. Croix riverfront in Stillwater, is named for him. Nelson's shop was torn down for lumber in March 1911, having been previously turned into a furniture store.

In 1885, the Nelson School, named after him, was constructed in Stillwater and opened on September 28 of that year. To accommodate a growing student body, a new facility was opened at the same site on September 25, 1897, and on October 25, 1979, the building was listed in the National Register of Historic Places.

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A stock certificate is issued by businesses, usually companies. A stock is part of the permanent finance of a business. Normally, they are never repaid, and the investor can recover his/her money only by selling to another investor. Most stocks, or also called shares, earn dividends, at the business's discretion, depending on how well it has traded. A stockholder or shareholder is a part-owner of the business that issued the stock certificates.

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Price: $240.00