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LANOGA CONTINUES TO EMBRACE ANCESTORS' ASPIRATIONS
The year was 1855. The country was less than 80 years old, and already there was growing tension between the North and the South. It was a time of expansion, when several of the nation's pioneers would embark on a westward journey, and two families would plant the seeds of a company whose legacy would outlive their most ambitious dreams. No one could have imagined that a simple homegrown lumber business would not only survive, but also thrive, over 150 years to become what today is the Lanoga Corp., a major force in the lumber and building materials industry with sales expected to exceed $3 billion this year.
Lanoga's roots first took hold in April 1855, when brothers William, Matthew and John Laird trekked their purchase of $1,000 worth of lumber products down the Chippewa and Mississippi Rivers to Winona, Minn., and formed a partnership appropriately named Laird & Brothers. The business was aimed at wholesaling lumber that was rafted down from mills on the rivers of Wisconsin. About a year and a half later, Matthew and James Norton, second cousins to the Lairds, joined the family business, and the name was changed to Laird, Norton & Co. Soon thereafter, John and Matthew Laird left the company.
Through the American Civil War and the decades that followed, the company prospered with numerous lumber-yards along the Winona & St. Peter Railroad, as well as thousands of acres of timber holdings throughout the pinelands of Minnesota and Wisconsin.
At the turn of the century, after simplifying its name to Laird, Norton Co., the company seized an opportunity to make its first major investment in the Pacific Northwest, a region rich with lush forests, particularly the Douglas fir. The company joined in a venture to purchase nearly 1 million acres of timberland with a new partner. His name was Frederick Weyerhaeuser. And at that time, a new company was created, the Weyerhaeuser Timber Co., which today is one the largest forest products companies in the country.
"Our movement from Winona to the Pacific Northwest, our great partnership with the Weyerhaeuser family that created the Weyerhaeuser Company and then created Boise Cascade ... all of those entities, the genesis of those...