After he moved with his family from Buffalo to Chicago in 1865, when he was still a boy, Edward Hines worked for some of the leading lumber companies in the city, including S. K. Martin. In 1892, Hines created his own lumber business, the E. Hines Lumber Co.; his enterprise sold more than 100 million feet of lumber in 1893. In 1896, Hines was able to buy the operations of S. K. Martin, his former employer. By the early part of the twentieth century, his company employed about 1,500 men in the Chicago area; it owned forests and mills in Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Mississippi. By the 1920s, the company's main wholesale lumberyard was a 45-acre facility on Chicago's South Side; it also had several smaller yards around the city. By the end of World War II, Hines grossed about $25 million in annual sales, making it one of the top 10 companies in the American lumber industry. By the mid-1970s, when the company employed about 500 people around Chicago, sales neared $300 million. Hines went out of business during the late 1980s.

This entry is part of the Encyclopedia's Dictionary of Leading Chicago Businesses (1820-2000) that was prepared by Mark R. Wilson, with additional contributions from Stephen R. Porter and Janice L. Reiff.