A retired volunteer firefighter sprang into action as disaster struck, and he says there has been an outpouring of support since the Mill Fire destroyed homes of families who have lived in the town since the Great Migration.
Published Sep. 8, 2022 4:48 PM EDT | Updated Sep. 8, 2022 4:48 PM EDT
For the past 23 years, the now-retired volunteer firefighter Reverend Alonzo Greene had always been the kind of person to jump into action. So when he heard an explosion go off in his community of Lincoln Heights in Weed, California, he wasted no time. He had already made it down the street by the time he remembered he didn't have any gear.
"I went in a tank top and Crocs to go help people," Greene, 58, told AccuWeather National Reporter Bill Wadell. "But it all worked out, and we ended up saving some people. There were so many heroic acts. I hear so many of people doing things in the midst of this firestorm."
Since its ignition on Friday, Sept. 2, the Mill Fire has grown to nearly 4,000 acres and destroyed more than 100 buildings, including homes, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CAL FIRE) reported. Amid the destruction, Greene's 100-year-old church, the Mount Shasta Baptist Church, still stands, but its congregation has a lot of healing to do after the fire, he said.
The exact cause of the blaze is still under investigation, though one of the main areas of focus in Cal Fire's investigation is the Roseburg Forest Products' lumber mill where Weed residents reported watching in horror as one of the sheds went up in smoke and flames, according to The Sacramento Bee.
On Sunday, Siskiyou County Sheriff Jeremiah LaRue confirmed two women, ages 66 and 73, were killed in the fire. Three people have been injured by the blaze, according to CalFire.
Within minutes of the fire's ignition, strong winds blew the flames into Lincoln Heights, a historic Black neighborhood, originally dubbed "the Quarters," that began as a community segregated from white residents. The blaze destroyed dozens of homes, many of which Greene said were generational, so the owners may not have any paperwork or insurance.
The Great Migration in the early 20th century saw some 6 million Black Americans from the Southern states move to the North, Midwest and West for better economic opportunities, including Northern California.
Weed started out as a corporate-owned lumber town founded by Abner Weed, who also bought the Siskiyou Lumber and Mercantile Mill. Weed would later become its own town in 1901, and the lumber baron sold the mill to the Long-Bell Lumber Company, a Kansas-based lumber company that also owned mills across the South.
The company brought some of its foremen and workers from the South to work at the lumber mill, and soon their families followed.
"Long-Bell brought a lot of people from Louisiana, Arkansas, Texas and different places to Weed because at that time they worked for them there and they just moved them out here," Redding, California, resident Mildred Jacobs told Mark Oliver in his documentary From the Quarters to Lincoln Heights. Greene's family was among those to make the journey.
"My grandfather came out here, working for the railroad, and once he got to Weed he got a job at the mill, he went all the way back, got his brothers," Greene said. Once they had all gotten jobs at the mill, they brought the rest of their family to the town.
Greene told Mercury News that many early Black mill employees had built many of the small houses that were a part of Lincoln Heights, with oral history suggesting Long-Bell had given them wood or sold it to them for a cheap price.
Despite Black Americans having migrated to Weed for better job opportunities, there were few options outside of a job at the mill where some of the machines proved to be deadly. In the 1960s, people began to protest with help from the Congress of Radical Equality, a group founded in 1942 in Chicago that advised and supported Martin Luther King Jr. during the Montgomery bus boycott.
The protest was a success, but the change was slow. While there was some desegregation in Weed, Lincoln Heights remained a mostly Black community.
As for the mill, it went through a series of owners before the Oregon-based Roseburg Forest Products bought it in the 1980s, according to The Sacramento Bee.
After the fire, Greene said that the outpouring of support has been "tremendous."
"The phones are off the hook, I can't keep it charged, but it's such a blessing to see that people care," Green said. "It's so sad that we have to have an event like this to pull people together, but I believe it's going to do just that, and the city of Weed will overcome this too."
Reporting by Bill Wadell.
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