What Does The Fisher Family Own?

The Fisher family owns an unusual combination of businesses, Fisher Companies Inc. operates as the holding company for three distinct businesses—Fisher Mills Inc., Fisher Broadcasting Co., and Fisher Properties Inc. —involved in flour milling, radio and television broadcasting, and real estate, respectively.

For a half century the Fisher family businesses were stewarded by O.D. Fisher, who founded the Fisher family’s catalytic business concern, Fisher Flouring Mills, then developed the Fisher family fortune for the ensuing five decades.

By the mid-1990s, Fisher Companies, through its subsidiaries, owned flour mills and flour distribution centers, television and radio stations, and various real estate properties.

When Oliver David (O.D.) Fisher arrived in Seattle in 1906, the 31-year old Missouri native had found his new home, deciding immediately that the entrepreneurial prospects in the region provided him with the opportunity to fulfill his ambitious business plans for the future.

The decision to stay and build a business in Seattle came to O.D Fisher through an epiphany of sorts, prompted by a visit to the harbor abutting burgeoning downtown Seattle, where Fisher stood one day in 1906 and surveyed the bustling activity surrounding him.

In the years bridging his birth and his arrival in Seattle in 1906, O.D. Fisher had established himself as an industrious worker with considerable experience in a broad assortment of businesses that would hold him in good stead once he organized his company in Seattle.