Lumber Co. and, and gave birth to the town of Weed. By 1902 he purchased a second mill (known as Mill No. 2) in Truckee and had it moved and placed beside his first mill.

Between both mills the Weed Lumber Co. produced 60,000 feet of lumber a day. The mills were operated as a family business for three years before Weed created a corporation,

with R. A. Long, of Long Bell Lumber Company, being a major shareholder. Four Years after it’s founding, in 1905, the Long-Bell Lumber Co. out of Kansas bought out Abner

Weed's share in the Weed Lumber Co. for an estimated two million dollars. Long-Bell’s operation was to define the term "company town", most of the people lived in homes on

“company land”, and it was said that if you didn’t shop at the company store, they would fire you. The company furnished employment and housing for its workers, and also provided

mercantile goods and social services until around 1942. Long Bell began building a new mill in 1917, which was to be more efficient than the two mills before, After its completion

in 1918 the new mill produced over 250,000 board feet of lumber per eight-hour work shift.. In 1919 the first two mills burned down as they were being dismantled.To protect its

newly constructed mill, Long Bell built a new firehouse in 1923, bought a new American La France fire engine and hired seven firemen from one of their plants in the south. Long

Bell operated an extensive rail network throughout the northeast corner of Siskiyou County and into western Modoc County. In 1926 Long Bell changed the name of its mill from the

original Weed Lumber Company to Long Bell Lumber Company. In 1956 it’s name was changed once again as International Paper Company took over the operation and later

closed its plant without warning in May of 1981. The peak of Weed’s lumber industry was in the 1940s and '50s . Long-Bell operated a McGiffert loader at it’s Weed operation; this

particular loader is now on display at the Collier Logging Museum in Oregon. In the 1920's Long Bell Lumber Company closed two of its Louisiana mills, one in Longville and the

other in De Ridder. When these mills closed in 1922, the company offered to advance transportation money to workers and to guarantee company housing and employment if they

agreed to relocate to Weed. When Black workers arrived in 1922 and 1923, company housing was made available for them in one section on the northwest end of town. Although

there is no record of the exact number of persons who came to Weed in the early 1920s, either from Long Bell's two Louisiana operations or through other personaL contacts, the

United States Census shows that Siskiyou County's Black population increased from 447 in 1920 to 541 in 1930.