Weed: Built on Wind and Lumber

Abner Weed was not looking for a town. He was looking for a way to dry lumber faster. In eighteen ninety-seven he bought a sawmill at the base of Mount Shasta for four hundred dollars, along with about two hundred eighty acres of land, and noticed something unusual: a strong, steady wind blew down the mountain almost constantly.

That wind, he realized, could season green lumber without kilns. He expanded the mill, brought in workers, built a cookhouse and a bunkhouse, and a company town took shape around the operation. By nineteen oh two he had moved a circular mill down from Truckee and was producing over sixty thousand board feet a day.

Weed incorporated in nineteen sixty-one. By the nineteen forties the mill had grown to be the largest sawmill in the world, and the company town founded on a convenient breeze had become a genuine city.