The rural California town of Weed was already struggling. Then its iconic totem pole fell

WEED, Calif. — Its big-toothed smile is busted. Its left side is shattered. Its ornate bird wing has been ripped off.

The redwood totem pole of Weed — a 32-foot roadside oddity that stood for 64 years — now lies flat in the parking lot of the Ray’s Food Place grocery store.

While on a reporting trip to Northern California a few days ago, I stopped for coffee in Weed, a historic logging town of 2,700 people about an hour south of the Oregon border. I pulled into Ray’s to check my map, and there, to my surprise, was the totem, half smiling in the rain, out by the dumpsters.

It was, according to the Weed Police Department, felled the night of Feb. 10 by a semi truck driver who knocked it over while trying to make a turn — an apparent accident.

As in so many rural places, including the Oklahoma farm towns where I grew up, the people of Weed take immense pride in their town’s history and are fiercely defensive of their home, even when the future looks uncertain and outsiders dismiss the place as dead or dying.

The totem pole was the kind of quirky thing locals brag about. Seeing it fallen, a stark symbol of the town’s recent struggles, broke my heart.

With its worn and chipped paint and its exposure to the elements, the totem pole has been slowly rotting from the inside. For decades, it was a landmark in Siskiyou County, standing tall at the intersection of Highways 99 and 97, with an epic vista of snowy Mt. Shasta behind it.

The totem pole was installed in the summer of 1962 to celebrate the opening of what was then a gleaming new Safeway store.

Weed, officially incorporated as a city just one year prior, was thriving. Amid the post-World War II housing boom, timber was king, and the town hit its peak of more than 3,200 people in the early 1960s.

The totem pole was hand-carved by the Marin County artist Barney West, whose enormous redwood sculptures included another 50-foot totem pole outside a Safeway in Tahoe City and numerous giant tikis outside Polynesian-themed Trader Vic’s restaurants.

In 1969, United Press International dubbed him “the world’s most ambitious whittler.”

“Michaelangelo had his granite blocks, and I’ve got my redwood trees,” West told the wire service. “We both, if you’ll pardon the expression, let the chips fall where they may.”

West told reporters that he was aboard two U.S. Merchant Marine boats during World War II that were torpedoed and sunk in the South Pacific. He survived and on the nearby islands, he learned to carve. In his later years, he wore a seaman’s cap while he whittled and mused to a Santa Cruz Sentinel journalist in 1960 that he should put “a totem pole at every supermarket across the country.”

It was an optimistic time in rural Northern California. Then, in the 1990s, the timber industry cratered. Sawmills shuttered. Towns shrank.

The loss of the beloved totem pole outside the Weed supermarket comes amid a tough stretch for Weed, which is still recovering from a deadly 2022 fire that destroyed scores of homes.

In September, the 1917 building that once housed the historic Black Butte Saloon in downtown Weed was destroyed in a fire. City officials said they suspect it was arson.

Then in December, one of the town’s largest employers, Roseburg Forest Products, shut down its veneer mill, putting 140 employees out of work. The plant stood on the site where town founder Abner Weed, who bought the property in 1897, built his first timber mill.

In mid-January, Mount Shasta Brewing, a 23-year-old craft brewery, closed. The brewery’s chief executive told the Redding Record Searchlight that tourist traffic had dipped and that the business was looking for a new location — not necessarily in Weed.

I talked to Weed City Manager Dustin Stambaugh in December, just after the veneer plant closure was announced. He told me the town was grappling with how to care for so many suddenly jobless residents.

While the losses of recent months had been devastating, he said, city leaders “want to acknowledge that behind every situation, there is hope.”

“We’re not ignoring the pain,” he said. “You have those human moments of grief. … We’re not ignoring those feelings, but at the same time, it’s, ‘What can we salvage? How can we adapt?’”

As for the totem pole? Dan Gustafson, the director of advertising for C&K Market, which owns Ray’s Food Place, told me by email: “We are still assessing whether the Totem Pole can be repaired; if it can, we will get it back up.”

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Today’s great photo is from Times photographer Jason Armond. Pictured is Dr. Bill Releford, owner of L.A. County’s largest Black-owned farm, where healing grows from the ground up.

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