The devastation stretches for blocks. Metal skeletons of cars and blackened trees indicate where properties once stood in the shadow of Mount Shasta.
This neighborhood, Lincoln Heights, was once the thriving and vibrant home of a Black community — a rare sight in predominantly white, rural Siskiyou County, which hugs the Oregon border. Black laborers moved here from Louisiana, Mississippi and Arkansas to work at a lumber mill in the 1920s, and their descendants continued to live in houses on the outskirts of town, passed down through generations.
The rapid blaze was the latest in a series of fires in California that, as the climate warms, have leveled neighborhoods like Coffey Park in Santa Rosa, or towns like Paradise and Greenville. That devastation has forced wildfire victims to choose between rebuilding or starting life anew elsewhere. The company lent workers the train fare and provided them with wooden houses amid the aspens and pines in a small place called Weed. It was a company-owned, segregated town, and Black mill workers and their families were required to live on the northern outskirts. That neighborhood was known as the Quarters and, later, Lincoln Heights.
That began to change in the 1950s and 1960s, when the civil rights movement slowly arrived in Siskiyou County. In Weed, Black residents arranged sit-ins at restaurants that wouldn’t serve them and boycotted businesses until they agreed to hire them. “On the weekends, that was always packed,” said Lawrence Robison, 39, who grew up in the neighborhood. “Family gatherings, barbecues — just a place to go and relax at the end of the day.”In 1982, International Paper Co., which had succeeded Long-Bell, sold the sawmill to Roseburg Forest Products, a transaction that residents mark as the beginning of the decline of the local logging business. Around that time, advances in automation and a growing environmental movement curtailed lumber jobs.
The city accounts for 6% of the population in Siskiyou County, but has 36% of the county’s Black residents, based on 2020 census data. It also has a higher share of Hispanic and Asian American residents than the county as a whole. On the surface, people in Weed “still get along quite well,” Andrew Greene said. But he takes pains to avoid topics that could cause tempers to flare.
Down the block, his father was sitting down for lunch. Suddenly, he heard frantic knocking on his door. “Fire,” his neighbor gasped out.In what felt like an instant, the neighborhood was engulfed in smoke, and the billowing winds sent flames from the direction of the mill into the neighborhood. She escaped, but her house and all of her possessions — including her wedding ring and coin collection — were gone.Green, the mayor pro tem, was also in trouble. He rushed out of his house without shoes, into the thick smoke.
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