Pamplin Communications history

Pamplin, Jr., earned two master’s degrees, one in business administration and one in education at the University of Portland, and after a bout with cancer in 1975, a master’s and a doctorate at Western Conservative Baptist Seminary in Portland, Oregon.

By the time he retired due to company policy on his 65th birthday on November 25, 1976, Georgia-Pacific had grown to employ 40,000 and had evolved into one of the largest integrated manufacturers of plywood, lumber, gypsum, and other building products in addition to pulp, paper, and paper products.

When he “got in a fuss with [Mount Vernon’s] management” in 1982, he purchased the remaining outstanding shares of the company in order to replace its managers and undertook a $5 million expansion program to improve operations.

With the 1985 acquisition of Riegel, it moved from 13th to fourth in a ranking of Oregon’s privately held corporations.

In 1986, Pamplin, Sr., gave $10 million to Virginia Tech, and they named the College of Business after him.

In the early 1990’s, a tract of land in Dinwiddie County, Virginia, became available for purchase.

In 1992, Pamplin, Jr., chairman of the board of Lewis and Clark College in Portland, challenged its students and staff to meet or beat him in a series of physical fitness activities in return for his donation of up to $1 million.

Its 1993 revenues from its mills and Ross Island totaled almost $700 million, on which the company made a $50 million profit.

He acquired the original one-hundred acres of historic land and funded the construction of a $5,000,000 development, including an interpretive center and a one-mile trail, which opened in June 1994 as Pamplin Park Civil War Site.

In 1998, in a very different venture, Pamplin, Jr., teamed up with a former employee of Made in Oregon, a chain of stores that sold items manufactured in Oregon exclusively, to form Your Northwest, which opened its first store in Dundee, Oregon, in 1998.

That vision became a reality on Memorial Day Weekend 1999, with the opening of The National Museum of the Civil War Soldier, a 25,000 square-foot, $13,000,000 state-of-the-art facility.

In 2000, the subsidiary bought Community Newspapers, Inc., through which it gained control of 11 suburban Portland papers that had a combined circulation of 175,000.

Pamplin Music Company, a division of Pamplin Communications, was the fourth largest independent distributor of Christian music by 2001.