Plum Creek Timber (NYSE: PCL) is the largest private landowner in the United States. Most of its lands were originally purchased, or otherwise acquired as timberland.
Headquartered in Suite 4300 at 999 Third Avenue in Seattle, Plum Creek was spun off from Burlington Resources as a master limited partnership on June 8, 1989. It converted to a real estate investment trust on July 1, 1999 in order to obtain tax and accounting advantages available to concerns primarily involved in real estate development.
Burlington Resources was created from the Burlington Northern railroad's natural resources holdings in 1988; Plum Creek Timber is therefore heir to some of the 47 million acres (190,000 km2) of timberland originally granted by the federal government to the Northern Pacific Railway in the 1860s.
Today Plum Creek Timber owns and manages timber lands in the United States. The company engages in the sale and management of timber lands, and the sale of nonstrategic timber lands. It also produces a line of softwood lumber products, including common and select boards, studs, edge-glued boards, and finger-jointed studs. These products are targeted to domestic lumber retailers, such as retail home centers, for use in repair and remodeling projects. These products are also sold to stocking distributors for use in home construction.
In addition, the company engages in the natural resource businesses that focus on opportunities relating to mineral extraction, natural gas production, and communication and transportation rights of way. As of December 31, 2004, the company owned and managed approximately 7.8 million acres (32,000 km²) of timber lands in the northwest, southern, and northeast U.S., as well as owned and operated 10 wood product conversion facilities in the northwest U.S.
Read more about Plum Creek Timber: Transactions With The U.S. Federal Government, Environmental Record
Famous quotes containing the words plum, creek and/or timber:
“Twilight and bulb define
the brown room, the overstuffed plum sofa,
the boy, and the girl’s thin hands above his head.”
—Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980)
“It might be seen by what tenure men held the earth. The smallest stream is mediterranean sea, a smaller ocean creek within the land, where men may steer by their farm bounds and cottage lights. For my own part, but for the geographers, I should hardly have known how large a portion of our globe is water, my life has chiefly passed within so deep a cove. Yet I have sometimes ventured as far as to the mouth of my Snug Harbor.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The primitive wood is always and everywhere damp and mossy, so that I traveled constantly with the impression that I was in a swamp; and only when it was remarked that this or that tract, judging from the quality of the timber on it, would make a profitable clearing, was I reminded, that if the sun were let in it would make a dry field, like the few I had seen, at once.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)