When the Mill Fireplace tore by the Northern California city of Weed, it not solely claimed the lives of two residents and destroyed dozens of houses, it laid waste to a little-known however traditionally essential piece of Black historical past.
The Lincoln Heights neighborhood, largely flattened by the inferno Friday, is believed to be one of many solely intact Black neighborhoods west of the Mississippi River that dates again to the early days of the final century. About three-quarters of Lincoln Heights was diminished to smoking rubble by the blaze that residents mentioned moved with horrifying pace after igniting 1 / 4 mile away at or close to the sawmill that was key to the neighborhood’s founding.
Now, with the historic group’s future unsure, residents who misplaced all the pieces are additionally mourning the deaths of their neighbors.
On Sunday, the Siskiyou County Sheriff Jeremiah LaRue confirmed two ladies, ages 66 and 73, had been killed when the blaze erupted on Friday. Rodgers fled with flames engulfing his pickup truck and the aged neighbor he rescued screaming in terror.
“Everyone knew everyone,” mentioned Dave Rodgers, 59, who arrived in Lincoln Heights in 1964 from Mississippi at age 2 together with his mom and eight siblings. “Outdated folks would sit on the porch. It was a pleasant neighborhood. You wanted one thing, everyone was there that will help you.”
By Sunday afternoon, firefighters had slowed the blaze, which has grown to greater than 4.200 acres however was 25% contained. The devastation for the two,800 residents in Weed, a city within the shadow of Mount Shasta simply south of the Oregon border, was solely starting to sink in.
Yvette Hoy, whose house was destroyed on a ranch simply exterior Lincoln Heights, knew each of the victims of the fireplace. One was a cousin the opposite was a buddy. Her cousin was “church-going, loving, candy, sunny. No matter anyone wanted from her, she was at all times there,” Hoy mentioned. Her buddy had come to Weed from the Philippines and beloved fishing. “And will she fish!”
Rodgers misplaced all the pieces, too. His house, his two Chihuahuas, his boat, his RV are all gone — together with all however one of many group’s houses east of Freeway 97. He managed to get a peek on the nonetheless smoldering rubble on Saturday within the neighborhood that represented many years of distinctive California historical past. He summed up the loss in two phrases: “It’s horrible.”
Lincoln Heights was born through the Nice Migration that began within the early twentieth Century and noticed hundreds of thousands of Black folks in Southern states transfer north to flee racial violence and oppression and discover alternative. In Weed, that chance got here when the city’s namesake Abner Weed offered his lumber mill in 1905 to a Kansas firm with operations throughout the South. New proprietor Lengthy-Bell Lumber introduced many Black staff to the little California timber city, and lots of others adopted.
“My grandfather got here out right here from Mississippi within the ‘20s,” mentioned Alonzo Greene, pastor of the 100-year-old Mt. Shasta Baptist Church that survived the Mill Fireplace whereas lots of its congregants’ houses had been burned. “He acquired right here and went to work on the mill, and went again, acquired his brothers and different household to come back out right here and work within the mill.”
Early Black mill staff constructed most of the small homes that made up Lincoln Heights, Greene mentioned, with oral historical past suggesting Lengthy-Bell gave them wooden or offered it to them cheaply. “These guys used to hold lumber house from work to construct all of those homes that at the moment are burnt down,” mentioned Greene, 58, who was house in Lincoln Heights when the fireplace ripped into the neighborhood, and fled together with his truck filled with neighbors.
Greene and others from Lincoln Heights described the neighborhood as a microcosm of America’s racial historical past, from its founding as a group segregated by White residents, to the conflicts of the Civil Rights Period, to a racially-integrated neighborhood not totally depending on the Roseburg Forest Merchandise mill.
Lengthy-Bell lumber initially established the neighborhood to maintain the Black residents in a single place, mentioned Mark Oliver, a filmmaker whose documentary “From the Quarters to Lincoln Heights” displays the group’s authentic identify, earlier than its residents efficiently petitioned city authorities to vary it through the Sixties.
It was in that decade, amid the racial turmoil roiling the U.S., that the residents of Lincoln Heights, with some exterior assist, started to interrupt freed from the racism that stored them from totally collaborating in Weed’s financial system. The group’s folks, with few job alternatives apart from on the mill, started protests, with the help of the non-violent direct-action group Congress of Racial Equality, Oliver mentioned. They disrupted commerce at companies, shutting a few of them down briefly.
“The ‘60s in Weed was identical to the ‘60s in main cities: Blacks within the cities had been protesting, they had been marching, and that occurred right here, too,” mentioned James Langford, who got here to Weed in 1974 because the small metropolis’s first Black elementary faculty trainer, and labored with Oliver on the documentary. “They had been on the lookout for employment within the financial institution, employment at Safeway, simply basic employment. They wished to be a part of town of Weed, however they weren’t actually allowed.”
The protests labored, Oliver mentioned. “All these companies in Weed, they began hiring Black folks,” he mentioned.
That shift was a turning level for the folks of Lincoln Heights and the city, however change didn’t come instantly, Rodgers remembered. In his childhood, he mentioned, White schoolmates usually taunted him and different Black youngsters with racial slurs, resulting in fights. However, he mentioned, by the late ’70s, youngsters of various races had been typically getting alongside, enjoying baseball, soccer and basketball collectively, forging friendships bonds first amongst youngsters after which amongst dad and mom.
“It felt good whenever you didn’t have to fret about going to high school and attempting to battle, tearing up one another’s garments,” Rodgers mentioned.
Earlier than the fireplace, Lincoln Heights was nonetheless principally a Black group, however White and Asian folks lived there, too. Rigidity in Weed between Blacks and Whites is usually gone, mentioned Langford, who in his early days working at Weed Elementary acquired into bother for instructing youngsters about racism whereas instructing them on African-American historical past, and needed to confront a trainer who refused to forged Black youngsters at school performs. Just a few White associates nonetheless let slip racial feedback but it surely’s largely amongst older folks the place the “vestiges of racism” stay, he mentioned.
However most of the youthful folks raised in Lincoln Heights depart after they turn out to be adults, searching for jobs in larger facilities, residents mentioned. And the Mill Fireplace has put the group’s future and its legacy in peril, Pastor Greene nervous. Many older residents burned out of their houses — most likely at the very least half missing fireplace insurance coverage — could comply with their youngsters to different cities, he mentioned.
“This group can not simply go away,” he mentioned. “It’s historic and we have to reserve it.”
