In 1908 two American entrepreneurs, Dr. Dwight Brooks and Michael Scanlon, created a newsprint mill at Powell River, northwest of Vancouver.

In 1911 Julius Bloedel, a Seattle lawyer, along with his two partners, John Stewart and Patrick Welch, began acquiring large blocks of Vancouver Island forests.

The company had large camps near Menzies Bay, British Columbia, Comox and Myrtle Point, just south of Powell River.

With his colleague Whitford Julian VanDusen, another forester, MacMillan incorporated a company in 1919 to sell British Columbia lumber products to foreign markets.

During World War II, MacMillan acquired numerous small mills and timber tenures on the south coast of British Columbia.

Bloedel, Stewart and Welch held many timber resources and MacMillan was the first truly integrated forestry company in British Columbia.

[2] In 1993, the MacMillan Bloedel company composed an agenda of expanding its logging into new areas and refused to abandon its plans to clearcut a significant portion of the temperate rain forest around Clayoquot Sound on the west coast of Vancouver Island, in spite of opposition from several organizations.

This logging, however, was approved by the Ministry of Forests and was within the Tree Farm License (TFL) granted for that area to MacMillan Bloedel by the provincial government.

The merger made Weyerhaeuser, which at that time was already the world's largest producer of softwood lumber and market pulp, a leader in packaging as well.