Julius Bloedel

Julius Harold Bloedel (March 4, 1864 – September 21, 1957) was an American businessman and entrepreneur who operated primarily in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States and Canada.

Born in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, Bloedel moved from Wisconsin to Fairhaven, Washington (later Bellingham) in 1890, where he became president of Fairhaven National Bank. He engaged in several frontier business ventures, including the Samish Lake Lumber and Mill Company, Blue Canyon Coal Mines, and, as mentioned, the Fairhaven National Bank. He partnered and worked closely with the Bellingham pioneers. Although many of these operations folded eventually, Bloedel's financial know-how managed to keep him afloat through a series of boom-and-bust economic trials. In August 1898, he founded the Whatcom Logging Company with fellow frontier businessmen John Joseph Donovan and Peter Larson, which would later become known as the Bloedel-Donovan Lumber Mills. A park with this name exists today in Bellingham, which sits on the site of Bloedel's first lumber mill, which he dedicated as a park in 1946.

Using his existing operation in Bellingham as collateral, he began acquiring land in Canada, hoping to expand his lumber operation. In 1911, he and two new partners, John Stewart and Patrick Welch, came to Canada and began acquiring large blocks of forests on British Columbia's Vancouver Island. The Bloedel, Stewart and Welch operation eventually overshadowed Bloedel's previous ventures and their Franklin River logging camp soon became one of the world's largest logging operations. Here, in the 1930s, the Canadian logging industry saw its first steel spar and chainsaw. Welch and Stewart were also contractors on the construction of the Pacific Great Eastern Railway, operating with another partner as Foley, Welch & Stewart.

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