Simpson Investment Company history

The Reed legacy began in 1897 when Sol Simpson and Mark Edward Reed, at age 31, met for the for the first time, one a successful leader of a promising logging company and the other a failure at the same venture.

When Reed joined Simpson Logging, the company still relied on Port Blakley Mill Company for an overwhelming percentage of its business, but by 1902 Simpson had grown tired of the arrangement and severed the ties that connected his company from his former employer.

That title was bestowed on Reed in 1914 when he assumed full control over the company and began to spearhead the transformation that would turn a log supplier fettered to its 19th-century roots into a diversified, dominant forest-products corporation.

1920: The First Steps toward Diversification

In 1945, the company entered the redwood business with the purchase of Del Norte, California-based Requia Timber Company and the following year Simpson Logging signed the 100-year Shelton Cooperative Sustained Yield Unit (CSYU) agreement with the United States government.

In 1951, the company acquired Lowell, Washington-based, a maker of lithographic paper, book paper, and label paper used for canned goods and fruit boxes in the western United States.

Other developments during the decade included the establishment of another timber subsidiary in Canada, where Simpson Timber Co. (Alberta) Ltd. first began operating in 1973, and the acquisition of a plastics plant in Sunnyside, Washington, that was merged into Simpson Extruded Plastics Company.

In 1995, the company narrowed its focus by selling its PWPipe subsidiary to Mitsubishi Chemical America Corp.