Posted on 09/04/2022 7:39:35 PM PDT by hiho hiho
It was a company town, Weed, anchored by a lumber mill and a nearby neighborhood populated by Black workers recruited from the South a century ago to work in the mill.
Now both have been devastated by wildfire.
The Mill fire tore through parts of the Roseburg Forest Products mill Friday afternoon in Weed and destroyed much of the Lincoln Heights neighborhood, a tight-knit working-class community that sprang to life in the 1920s to house Black millworkers.
“Everybody on that street knew everybody,” said Daudi Etter, 50, a lifelong Lincoln Heights resident whose home was destroyed Friday.
Standing on the outskirts of the neighborhood early Saturday, he said, “It looks like a bomb went off.” For 45 harrowing minutes Friday, Etter, who’d been at work in Mount Shasta when the fire started, didn’t know whether his 11-year-old stepdaughter, Amaya, had survived the fire. He later discovered that someone had evacuated her safely.
Others weren’t so lucky, Etter said, including one elderly woman he had heard didn’t have time to make it out. She was believed to be dead, he said.
The fire marked a catastrophic chapter for this city of 2,600, which was named for timber tycoon Abner Weed, who emigrated from Maine and bought a small lumber mill for $400 in 1897.
Ironically, he picked the location after discovering “that the area’s strong winds were helpful in drying lumber,” according to the city’s website. Witnesses said fierce winds helped drive the Mill fire through the city.
By the 1920s, the facility was owned by the Long Bell Lumber Co., which recruited Black workers from its mills in the South, paid their train fare and moved them to Weed.
(Excerpt) Read more at oregonlive.com ...
Fires are racist.
Notice how no fires ever burn Caucasian people’s homes?
Oh,... wait...
yep....nothing bad ever happens to the non minorities....nature has it in for minorities...
Living in New Mexico I really feel sad for these folks. Fire can destroy hundreds of years of living in hours, minutes.
Why do they now capitalize “black” but not “white”?
Racist Wildfire?
Trump’s fault?
MAGA voter’s fault?
Glow-bull warming?
I agree. It’s so true. /s “:^)
Sad. We used to drive past Weed all the time going up the 5 back to Washington State. Beautiful area.
Black Butte was pretty neat huh.
You can drive through Weed in about one minute, so how many people are we talking about ?
I call BS
I just heard about this from a youtuber I watch. The mill burned to the ground and will have far reaching consequences.
“You can drive through Weed in about one minute...”
Up there on the Interstate, yeah. Take that exit that heads up to Klamath, and it’s a totally different story; there’s actually a heckuva town down there beyond the trees that line I-5.
Ok, two minutes.
Fast and Furious stunt drivers: Oh, yeah? You're on.
Story about smoking weed? Not clickbait in most cities.
After the fire Weed was smoking. Now it’s interesting.
I get your point, but there are over 2,800 residents.
A real shame; small, picturesque town.
We got stranded there in the 90s, when a VW tire installed by Les Schwab, in Medford, went flat, and we couldn’t change it.
Lug wrench wouldn’t budge the lug bolts. Station’s air wrench couldn’t break them loose. A trucker & his 6’ cheater bar couldn’t budge them.
Several hours later, a minister on his way to a church conference in Portland, driving an older econobox, was carefully calculating how much gas he could afford, to get him to a cheaper station in Oregon.
I bought him enough gas to get to Medford, in return for taking the wife & I there; then, when we arrived, we filled his tank for him.
Our handyman neighbor picked us up, and drove us back again in his work truck, and used his torch & tools to loosen the lug bolts.
That minister received regular donations to his food pantry/soup kitchen ministry for years.
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