Weed Centennial Plaza was designed and built by the citizens of Weed and dedicated on September 9, 2001 as a birthday gift to the city. The plaza includes several of the 3500 bricks salvaged from the old sawmill and powerhouse, hand cleaned by volunteers, and sold through a buy a brick fundraising drive supported by local businesses and current and former residents. Its wheel-shaped design represents Weed as the hub of Siskiyou County, and at its center stands a welded steel sculpture of Abner Weed, the city's founder. A pioneer industrialist, Abner Weed built the first lumber mill here on the northwest slope of Mt. Shasta in 1901 and used the area's famous winds to dry freshly cut lumber. The city grew around logging camps that became the Weed Lumber Company, and a curved wall sculpture by Siskiyou County artist Ralph Starritt depicts scenes from Weed's logging past, with 14,162 ft Mt. Shasta behind it. Abner Weed was born on September 18, 1842 in Dixmont, Maine, and died on June 14, 1917 in Weed, California. Logging operations were underway in the area by 1891, and in 1897 Weed began showing the first signs of a booming logging town after Abner Weed recognized the area's timber, water, and nearly constant wind. He bought a 280-acre site in the wind's path in 1897, and by late 1902 the town had a cookhouse, bunkhouse, post office, two mills, a box factory, a boarding house, a mercantile building, several homes, and soon afterward a hospital. By 1905 Weed was a busy company town, and by 1907 a new section west of Division Street emerged as Shastina. Around that time Abner Weed sold the Weed Lumber Company to Long Bell Lumber Company, which merged with International Paper Company in 1956. Weed was incorporated as a city in 1961. Abner Weed also served in the California State Senate in 1907 and 1909, gaining the title Honorable Senator Weed. Fires repeatedly shaped the town's history: in 1915 a devastating blaze destroyed Lumber Yard 3 and briefly threatened the town's existence, in 1918 another fire burned almost the entire south side of Main Street, and in 2015 a fire southeast of town destroyed about 150 buildings, about 130 of them homes.