Postcards from the Rogue Valley

Central Oregon and Pacific train loading plywood at Weed, California lumber mill, bound for Roseburg Forest Products in Springfield, Oregon, 2019

Two years ago, I posted a story about my then three-year-old grandson’s passion for trains and how on a Thanksgiving visit to Ashland from Denver, his home, he had patiently sat along the empty train tracks that run through Ashland, hoping to catch a “live” train. He had already covered our living room floor with the used Brio train sets we’d accumulated.  

After two days of waiting, sitting cross-legged a foot from the track, Damian gave up his vigil. No trains passed.

Conceding defeat, he asked me to tell him about “the trains back in time.” I told him what little I knew: How in 1887, when the Southern Pacific Railroad finally managed to lay tracks through the steep and winding 4,310-feet Siskiyou Summit (the highest point on Interstate 5, between Canada and Mexico), Ashland became a popular stop on the route that connected Northern California to Portland. Before that, a several-day stagecoach ride had jostled passengers across the breach. Forty years later, passenger train travel through Ashland ended when Southern Pacific re-routed trains away from Ashland over to Klamath Falls, 70 miles to the east. The new route promised a less challenging ride. 

“So it’s over,” Damian sighed. “That’s sad.”

Not quite, it turns out.

Two days after Damian returned to Denver, I heard a train whistle unmistakingly coming from the tracks a mile from our house. “Damian, it’s back,” I shouted into the air.  Since then, every Tuesday and Thursday, once in the morning and once in the afternoon, the soulful sound of a small freight can be heard making its way through town. 

What’s the story? (I faintly remembered occasionally hearing a train’s whistle when we first moved the Ashland in 2018.)

The quick version, I learned, is that the train, part of the Central Oregon and Pacific Railroad line, carries wood veneer from a small lumber mill in Weed, California, owned by Roseburg Forest Products, to Roseburg’s distribution center in Springfield, Oregon, a distance of 168 miles. Scratch deeper, and the history of this Northern California mill town is as sinuous as the Siskiyou Summit, 11 miles south of Ashland.

Left: Abner Weed in his first Franklin, 1910; Right: Weed Mill workers, 1904

Weed, California, nestled amid pines and aspens near the base of Mount Shasta, has always pulled more than its weight. In a Pacific Northwest where small towns have come and gone, it has persisted, expanding and contracting for more than a century. It’s a lumber town and, through much of its history, a company town serving a succession of owners.

“The credit for the existence of the town must go to Abner Weed, who believed in its possibilities,” a proclamation in Weed’s Historic Lumber Town Museum says.

In 1897, when Abner Weed, a lumber mill pioneer, discovered that the area’s strong winds were helpful in drying green lumber, he bought 280 acres of land for $400 and built the Weed Lumber Mill. He also lent the town his name.

“Workmen had to have a place to eat, and a place to sleep, so a large cook house was built near the mill and next to it a bunk house,” the Historic Lumber Town Museum’s proclamation continues. “There must be houses for the families.”

There also “must be” railroad access to move lumber to the mill and, once processed, away to cities where it was needed. Weed also insured that these were in place.

Abner Weed’s project was short lived, however. (He turned to politics and railroad building, more to his liking.)

In 1905, the Yreka Journal announced: “Supervisor Abner Weed has sold the stock of the Weed Lumber Company to a Kansas syndicate, R.A. Long, a Kansas City millionaire lumberman and others being purchasers. The purchasers organized a new company capitalized at $2,000,000.00.”

The Weed Lumber Mill became Long-Bell. Abner Weed gave the town’s citizens permission to change the name of the town, but they declined. “He put us on the map,” residents reasoned, “and there he will stay.”

Left: Long-Bell Mill and right, Shastina saloon, circa 1925

New growth

Long-Bell ushered in a new era. On the lookout for untouched forests out West and the workers to process them, Long-Bell began luring hundreds of Black Southerners to its mill in Weed, promising employment at $3.60 a day and lending the $89 train fare. These “colored newcomers” crowded into boarding houses or camped in tents until company houses were built on streets with names such as Texas, Alabama, Louisiana and Dixie. The neighborhood earned the nickname, the ”Quarters.” 

Weed grew exponentially, reaching an estimated population of 6,000 in the 1920’s. It was a classic company town, like its brethren in remote mining and forest outposts across the country. In Weed, however, it was not only the Quarters that divided the town. The company-owned Long-Bell side of Weed contained the mill, boarding houses, churches and schools, and established businesses. Liquor and prostitution were off limits.

The newly named “Shastina” district was unabashedly lawless. During the Prohibition, it sported 17 brothels and 14 illegal saloons; doors connected many of the businesses, allowing patrons to move between establishments without going outside (where they could be detected). The Redding [CA] Free Press described Weed as the “Sodom and Gomorrah of Siskiyou County”(Weed Now and  Then).

Despite these divisions (or, better said, diversions), the Long-Bell mill prospered, claiming to be the world’s largest sawmill in the 1940s. 

In the late 1950’s, Long-Bell sold out to International Paper Company who, in turn, sold all the company-owned homes to the residents, who quickly changed the neighborhood’s name from the “Quarters” to “Lincoln Heights” and renamed the Southern street names.

In 1961, the 4.6 square mile City of Weed was incorporated as a General Law City in the state of California. 

One thing did not change during these years: the freight tracks that connected Weed’s sawmill to its owner’s retail lumber yards, often in the mid and southwest. “Sawmilling is logging, logging is railroading,” an early 20th century quip supposedly went.

For lumber trains heading due north from Weed, muscling through the Siskiyou Summit, with its winding 3.6 percent grade and brake testing downgrad, remained a formidable challenge — made harder still when the freight contained flat cars stacked with logs or plywood, often requiring six engines. Over time, the tracks fell into disrepair.  A fire in one of the tunnels near the summit closed the track for almost two years, diverting freight through Klamath Falls. In 2018, CORP used a $7 million federal grant to rebuild the badly deteriorated tracks, putting Ashland back on the map, at least as far as the semi-weekly train between Weed and Roseburg Forest Products in Springfield, Oregon was concerned.

Left: Back mill workers, circa 1940; Right: “Whites Only” Log Cabin Hotel, circa 1920

Weed’s Black community

Books like Isabel Wilkerson’s masterful The Warmth of Other Suns tell of the millions of Black workers who moved to cities like Detroit and Chicago for factory and industrial work in an era known as the Great Migration. The story of Black people settling in rural timber country, typically politically conservative and very white, is largely unknown.

Long-Bell’s campaign to lure Black Southerners to its mill in Weed was wildly successful. An estimated 1,000 of the 6,000 Weed citizens in the 1920s were Black. 

The jobs at the mill may have been plentiful, but segregation ran deep.

Weed resident Willie Wardlow in a 1967 interview recalls: “We used to see a For Rent sign, and when we asked, you know what they’d tell us?  They’d say, ‘We only rent to Americans.’” 

For decades, residents of Weed turned to their own churches, barbershops and nightclubs. They were prohibited from being buried in the white-only graveyard and barred from white-owned stores and cafes. The small houses Long-Bell leased to its Black workers lacked indoor plumbing. (Mother Jones, How a Timber Town Spawned a Black Community, 2022)

“Your parents would buy you an ice cream cone, you had to go outside to eat it — you couldn’t use the counter,” recalled Al Bearden, a retired probation officer who grew up in Weed. He was interviewed as part of a 2011 documentary about how the large, established African-American population in Weed came to root themselves in such an unlikely place.

At the sawmill, White workers were given safer, more lucrative jobs indoors. The only integration came at school — where white and Black children learned together before returning to their cloistered communities — and on the Weed Sons, the town’s baseball team. (When looking at old black and white photos in the Lumber Town Historic Museum, I noticed that all of the White baseball players on the Weed Sons were Italian, joined by two Blacks.)

In the mid 50s, the national Civil Rights movement found its way to Weed. Between 1955 and 1958, the town’s Black residents, in partnership with the NAACP, staged sit-ins at Weed’s segregated eating establishments, including the town’s Log Cabin Hotel where a sign read, “We cater to whites only.” The sit-ins proved successful.

In 1966, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) organized a chapter in Weed. That summer — as Watts to its south exploded in violence and arson — Weed’s CORE members staged boycotts at the town’s Safeway store, a dry goods store, a creamery, and United California Bank. In this case, the object of the demonstrations was an economic one: to urge local employers to hire Blacks in a capacity other than clean-up. These efforts bore modest fruit. (BlackPast.org, 2010)

Nevertheless, the Black population in Weed remained rooted. The 1970 census figures for Weed showed a 14 percent Black population out of a total population of 3,600. In the same year, only 2.1 percent of the surrounding Siskiyou County was Black. (In Ashland, which remained a “sundown town” into the 1950s in line with Oregon’s “Whites Only” history, the Black population in 1970 was in the single digits.)

Roseburg Forest Products website, 2025

A new owner: Roseburg Forest Products

In the 1980s and 90s, lumber mills nationwide were in decline, caused by a combination of economic downturns, stricter environmental regulations, and increased automation.

The most decisive factor for the Pacific Northwest lumber industry was the listing of the northern spotted owl as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act in 1990. Legal challenges from environmental groups led to court-ordered injunctions that nearly halted all timber sales on federal land across Washington, Oregon, and California to protect the owl’s old-growth forest habitat.

Roseburg Forest Products — among the largest family-held wood products company in the U.S. with headquarters in Springfield, Oregon — purchased the Weed lumber mill in 1982, at the beginning of the downturn. The number of employees at the mill slimmed to 164 and the mill’s assignment narrowed: turning 4,500 to 5,000 logs a day into thin veneer sheets for plywood.

Billing itself as “a different kind of company,” Roseburg boasted: “Roseburg is an industry-leading wood-products company with an 80-year tradition behind us and a bright future ahead. We’re proud to be part of communities across North America, producing high-quality wood products, providing thousands of family-wage jobs, helping improve local economies and supporting important local causes.” (https://www.roseburg.com/who-we-are/about-us/)

It heralded its Weed plant as “in the background of giants” (referring to Mt. Shasta…).

Left: Mill Fire, 2022; Right: Weed residents protest “water grab” by Roseburg, 2018

Hooked at the hip

Compared to the mill’s previous overseers, Roseburg Forest Products proved to be a controversial partner. From the start, locals fretted about Roseburg’s failure to repair and upgrade the old mill. They worried about fire — with good reason.

In 2014, what became known as the Boles Fire swept Weed. Within two hours, it destroyed or damaged 157 buildings, homes, the library, churches, and the community center, along with more than 375 acres. It left a third of the town’s property owners and renters homeless. It damaged the mill, displacing some 60 workers. California’s Governor Edmund G. Brown soon declared the Boles Fire in the City of Weed a disaster.

In 2022, fire struck Weed again. This time, the fire started in the Roseburg mill (which the owners denied until the evidence was unequivocal). The fire made national headlines, not only for its ferocity (it burned 4,000 acres), but for what it left behind: the decimation of Weed’s Black neighborhood, “Lincoln Heights,” killing two people and destroying 60 homes.

An article in The New York Times described the devastation left by the Mill Fire:

The gray rubble appears suddenly on both sides of the highway winding through this small Northern California town, as houses give way to a landscape of charred wreckage and the remains of homes, bleached white by wildfire.

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. …For decades, the mill next to Lincoln Heights offered opportunity and hope for those seeking a job and a better life. Now, residents see it as a symbol of the neighborhood’s destruction.”

Roseburg officials said the company would provide $50 million for a “community restoration fund,” but that the money was not an admission of liability. “You’re trying to give $50 million to shut our mouths,” the Mayor Pro Tem Stacy Green, who was Black, told Roseburg officials.

Fire, however, was not the only source of sparks in Weed. 

For years, water from the pristine spring on land owned by Roseburg, and previous mill owners, had flowed freely to the town’s residents under a 50-year lease. “The water is so pure that it flows straight to my faucet,” the cashier at Weed Mercantile told me. “No treatment is necessary.” 

When the lease expired in 2016, Roseburg announced it was in negotiations with Japanese-owned Crystal Gyser who wanted to expand its small bottling facility in Weed and ship water to Japan. A New York Times headline read “Timber Company Tells California Town, Go Find Your Own Water.”

With its back to the wall, the Weed City Council approved a new water lease agreement that reduced the city’s water supply to 25 percent, raised annual costs to $97,500 a year, and required the city to pursue alternate sources of water within six months.

“We were hooked at the hip with this company for years,” former Weed Mayor Bob Hall told the Times. “Now they are taking advantage of peope who can’t defend themselves.”

The City of Weed sued Roseburg Forest Products (claiming the water was not legally theirs) and Roseburg countersued, producing a new settlement. Weary of the rancorous litigation, Crystal Geyser purchased the water rights, then sold them to the city at half the cost.  The city will pay off the purchase over the next twelve years with no interest. Most of that money will come from Weed water users, through small monthly utility fees that used to go to leasing costs.

The little lumber train that could

The lumber companies that defined Weed could not have prospered without the railroad tracks that ran north and south from town. For well over a century, railroads were instrumental in the expansion of the lumber industry across North America, especially from remote logging settlements in the forested Pacific Northwest.

It was the 2022 Mill Fire that had shut down the Weed to Roseburg train my grandson Damian waited for and missed two years ago, only to reappear two days after he left when the mill was back on line. Damian nicknamed it “the little lumber train that could.” How long will it last, he wonders.

Looking to the future, Weed has embraced what it shunned for years: opening the door to the cannabis industry, for which it is not named but linked by namesake. A few years ago, the City Council unanimously approved a plan for a sprawling facility on the edge of town with a capacity to grow 150,000 cannabis plants and employ 300 people.

“We have to keep moving forward,” said Dawnie Slabaugh, the director of public relations at the College of the Siskiyous, the community college in Weed. “Or we are going to just become another ghost town.”

Note: In 2020, Weed had a population of 2,862. The racial makeup was 58% White, 20% Hispanic/Latino, 6% African American, 2% Native American, 5 % Asian, 9% two or more races.

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