In 1915, Charles Patrick and William Brusoff founded Patrick Lumber Company and became part of the booming lumber industry in Oregon.

1922 was the year that we helped form the Portland Wholesale Lumber Association. the P.W.L.A. is the organization that annually holds the "Lumberman of the Year Award."

During the 1930's our company endured the Great Depression by entering the pole and piling business. President Roosevelt's New Deal called for vast improvements to our nation's infrastructure, and we helped supply the lumber to build our country's new railroads and utilities.

In the early 1940's before the economy had fully recovered, barter was a common practice in our industry. Our founder’s son, Jack Patrick, once sold and entire railcar of pine uppers in exchange for a race horse. Also during this time, Patrick Lumber began purchasing standing timber to sell to various Oregon sawmills with the option to handle the sales of the resulting sawn lumber.

Before he joined Patrick Lumber Company in 1943, Jack Madden had been Superintendent of Graders at the West Coast Lumber Inspection Bureau. Because of his prior occupation, Jack had very close relationships with lumber mills throughout Oregon and Washington. In the future, these relationships helped to expand our supplier base.

Jack Patrick and Jack Madden led the company into the 1950's when our company began focusing on the transit car business. Weekly listings would commonly offer a staggering 75 cars of lumber. During this post-war era, Patrick Lumber helped feed the rapid growth taking place in America. Hawaii was a massive consumer of our products, and we would ship lumber by the barge-load to feed their booming construction market.

In 1960, Jack Madden became President of our company and redirected the company's focus toward the export market. For a while, American Samoa represented a huge market for our company, and they would consume significant volumes of cedar shakes. The shakes stood up very well against the typhoons that would rip through the area. Although we don’t export directly to American Samoa anymore, we can safely assume it’s because our product has stood the test of time.

The company continued to grow into the 60’s and Bob McCracken was welcomed to the team. Shortly after, Jack Patrick succeeded Jack Madden as president. Yet another war began during the 1960’s, and our company was there yet again to help provide natural resources. Ron Yeager was brought on during this time, and he specialized in purchasing much of the lumber we sold to government contractors building naval bases in Vietnam.

During the 1970’s our export business evolved and expanded to service more markets. We forged relationships with agents in Italy, Greece, and Australia. The Australian market would eventually become one of our largest and even led to the establishment of a Patrick Lumber Company office in Australia. Edward Suttell was a key employee during this time, and helped coordinate our efforts from Australia.

In 1974 PLC underwent reorganization in order to for certain key employees to have larger stakes in the company.  It was under this reorganization that Bob McCraken became our next President. A couple of years later Tom Cartensen joined the company. Tom had been an industrial lumber specialist with North Pacific Lumber Co. for many years, and he quickly advanced to become a vice-president and joined Bob and Ron Yeager in managing the business.

In 1977, Tom began selling into the UK market. Ultimately, an old line English firms, William Brandt Ltd. would become the company’s agent. In 1984, John Groves and his associates left Brandt to set to set up Patrick Limber Ltd. The UK market became one of the company’s biggest.