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- The Emmersons, who own Sierra Pacific Industries, are the US' biggest private landowners.
- SPI owns more than 2.4 million acres of timberland in California, Oregon, and Washington, The Land Report says.
- Red Emmerson's sons, George and Mark, are chair and CEO of the company.
You've likely never heard of Red Emmerson and his sons George and Mark.
But they're the US' largest private landowners – and they've held onto the title since 2021, according to the latest edition of The Land Report.
The family owns more than 2.4 million acres of timberland in California, Oregon, and Washington, The Land Report said.
The family owns forest-products company Sierra Pacific Industries, for which George serves as chair and Mark as CEO. The company uses the land for timber, wildlife habitat, and recreation, and says it is among the US' biggest producers of lumber, millwork, and biomass energy.
After various largely unsuccessful stints running sawmills, Curly Emmerson partnered with his son, Red, to build a sawmill in Northern California in around 1950 under the name R.H. Emmerson and Son, per The Land Report's 2022 profile of the family. And this time, it was successful.
Curly bought the timber and Red operated the mill. For years, Red worked seven days a week, Forbes reported.
Red and business partner John Crook went on to found SPI in 1969 as a publicly-traded company, which Red then privatized in 1974 and dissolved the partnership, per The Land Report profile. Red built up the company's portfolio of land in California, including buying around 525,000 acres of timberland in a mammoth $465 million purchase in 1988, before the company made its first acquisition outside the Golden State when it bought land in Washington in 2006, The Land Report wrote.
"We had got to the point in California where there wasn't opportunity to expand," George told The Land Report. "We owned almost 1.5 million acres, and we weren't going to build another sawmill."
SPI expanded into Oregon with the purchase of 175,000 acres in 2021, and with it they became the US' largest landowners, according to The Land Report.
Forbes estimated in 2018 that SPI has annual sales of $1.5 billion. SPI says that it now has 18 sawmills across the three states. It also has window plants in Alabama and Wisconsin.
Red's daughter, Carolyn Dietz, leads the Sierra Pacific Foundation, which focuses on youth and community projects.