An Especially Painful Loss: Historic California Gold Rush Town Succumbs To Wildfire

A historic hotel in Greenville, California before a wildfire

destroyed the old Wild West community

It's a scenario that has become so painfully common in California and elsewhere in recent years.

A massive wildfire roars into a town, destroying blocks of homes, businesses, and other buildings. Lives are lost. Livelihoods are lost. All sense of security is lost. It's the new normal, but nothing about it feels normal. 

Paradise was lost, literally, when that town of 27,000 mostly burned down in 2018 in the Camp Fire. People are returning and rebuilding in that town, but it still faces an uncertain future. Especially since there's nothing preventing another huge fire from bearing down on the town from the surrounding mountains. 

A big chunk of Santa Rosa, California succumbed to flames in 2017 as a wildfire roared deep into the city of 179,000 people. It put a lie to the notion that you're safe from wildfires if you live away from the forest.

The wildfires keep coming, faster and more furiously. Several hamlets in Oregon were wiped out in a day last year. 

Earlier this summer, the tiny town of Lytton, British Columbia, Canada set the record for the hottest temperature on record for that entire nation. The next day, a wildfire roared into that baked community, demolishing it. The outskirts of Athens and parts of coastal Turkey this past week. 

One of the latest towns to disappear in a climate-related wildfire was the small hamlet of Greenville.   The so-called Dixie Fire laid waste to Greenville earlier this month. Compared to those larger communities decimated by fires recently, Greenville seems like small potatoes.  It had a population of only between 800 and 900 people. 

What made the loss of Greenville painful is its small downtown was a historic snapshot of what things looked like in Gold Rush era California. Before the fire, you can look at downtown Greenville, or photos of it, and in your minds eye see the Gold Rush wild west come alive. 

Wildfire has replaced Wild West.  Modern day Greenville was small enough so that most everybody knew each other. Some residents had been there for generations. Others fled the rush of the Bay Area or the Los Angeles basin to find peace in the mountains. 

Greenville was a quirky, remote mountain town, which made it a treasure. Descriptions of Greenville made me think of some unique, offbeat mountain towns here in Vermont, like Montgomery or Shrewsbury or Island Pond.  

Same hotel as above after the Dixie Fire roared 

through Greenville, California.

Nobody could capture what the loss Greenville suffered was like more than Meg Upton, who just wrote "Eulogy For Greenville" in Plumas News.

Imagine if we lost something like Montgomery or Shrewsbury to a wildfire. This is how Upton described her  "defiantly quirky beautiful adopted hometown." before the fire:

"We were an island of misfit toys and we liked it like that. Everywhere in the country there are people not getting along anymore because of different political perspectives, but in Greenville there flat out wasn't enough of us to take sides. You had to have each other's backs anyhow whether you agreed with someone or not."

Then the fire roared through.

"And now the bulk of it is gone. Some of us will have the stamina to rebuild and some of us will not. Some have insurance. Some do not. Our historic buildings are gone. Our newer ones are gone too. To live in Greenville was to live history. You couldn't escape history. Generations of families grew up here and came back again and again."

I don't know how much climate change had to do with the destruction of Greenville, but it almost surely played a part.  The region is enduring a historic drought. It's hotter and drier and scarier in California than it's probably been in centuries.  The fire that roared through Greenville is California's biggest fire on record, replacing a fire last year that had reached that grim milestone.

This  Dixie Fire is still burning.   Favorable weather conditions have since quieted that fire down in the days after it roared through Greenville. But it's a monster that is ready to wake up again and devour more towns, if other wildfires don't beat it to the punch first. 

There's always been wildfires in California. Now, though, they seem to be bigger, weirder, way more erratic, way more fierce, way more cataclysmic.

As I began writing this a couple week ago  out on my deck on a Vermont warm August evening, the air is thick with haze. Most of the haze consist of wildfire smoke, from the big fires in the western United States, or western or central Canada.

I don't know whether any of the smoke from the destruction of Greenville has reached us or whether the ashes fell somewhere else.  . But I suspect a tiny part of the frequent haze and smoke attacks we've seen in Vermont this summer might end up being the sooty remains of Greenville, California. 

All the haze and smoke we've seen in Vermont this summer isn't a big deal, compared to the destruction wrought by those western U.S. and Canadian forest fires.  But it still makes me sad. 

And a little worried. Sometimes more than a little worried. Climate change affects us all. 

Sometimes, it's an inconvenience. Sometimes it's an incredibly bitter loss. Greenville was one of those bitter losses. The saddest part is the pace of those bitter losses is increasing. And you never know who's next 

 

 

That's not to say Greenville can't come back in some fashion.  It was mostly destroyed in an 1881 wildfire and then quickly rebuilt