Timber leader John Hampton dies

Published 9:00 pm Friday, March 17, 2006

PORTLAND, Ore. – John Hampton, a prominent Northwest lumberman who loved opera, has died of lung cancer. He was 80.

He led Hampton Affiliates, a top Northwest timber company with about 1,500 employees and five sawmills in Oregon and Washington, including the sawmill in Darrington and a planer mill in Arlington. It anticipates total sales of more than $1 billion this year. The company holds 167,000 acres in the Northwest and has a production capacity of 1.4 billion board feet a year.

Hampton died Wednesday. He was “comfortable and assured, and went peacefully,” said his son Jamey Hampton.

Oregon Gov. Ted Kulongoski said in a statement that “all Oregonians lost one of their first citizens in the passing of John Hampton. Though he will be remembered as one of the giants of the timber industry, it must also be noted that he was one of Oregon’s greatest art patrons.”

Kulongoski also noted that Hampton “helped to craft the Oregon Salmon Plan, bringing land owners and communities together to ensure healthy forests and streams.”

Hampton, a fishing pal of Vice President Dick Cheney, was an outdoorsman convinced that Oregon had plenty of wilderness. He argued that public forests are a resource and should be managed “for more than recreation.”

He was as critical of his timber baron contemporaries who “failed miserably in their efforts to educate the public” as he was of the environmentalists he thought “hoodwinked the public,” he said in interviews for a profile in The Oregonian newspaper in February.

Hampton was born in Tacoma, where his father had a retail lumber business. During World War II, he reached south to Willamina, Ore., to buy a mill to assure supplies.

Hampton joined his father in the business and thrived as the timber industry changed and dealt with dwindling supplies from public lands. Inspired by innovative lumber producers in Scandinavia and New Zealand, Hampton became a U.S. pioneer of high-tech mills.

In the closing months of his life, he invested more than $10 million in the company’s Willamina, Ore., mill, installing a computerized planer that can produce 3,200 linear feet of lumber a minute.

With his wife, Carol, he became a collector of contemporary art, and he was a fundraiser for the Portland Art Museum and the Portland Opera. He led a $25 million capital campaign in 2003, and the opera’s waterfront headquarters was named The Hampton Opera Center.

Hampton is survived by his wife, sons David of Salem and Jamey of Portland, and daughters Elizabeth Painter of Denver and Cynthia of Portland.