Fall Forest Restoration Project. For three weeks in November, we will be engaged in a big forest restoration push at Black Butte! We will be thinning out our pines, clearing brush, limbing up trees and planting seedlings as part of turning what was a plantation back towards a more diverse, wildlife-friendly and fire-resilient forest. We will have people on site everyday and lots of volunteers coming and going. If you would like to be a part of this, please be in contact in advance and we’ll see where we can plug you in!
News
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BBCRC Open House and Boxcar Music Show
BBCRC Open House and Boxcar Music Show featuring Anna Tivel and Kale Chesney.
As part of the annual Siskiyou County “X Days” tour of creative spaces around the county, the BBCRC will be open from 3pm to 8pm for an open house and the closing reception for our “100 Year Tribute to the Black Butte Water Tower” art show in our Shasta Car gallery space. Between 5pm and 7pm, we will also host music in the boxcar featuring national touring folk artist Anna Tivel (https://www.annativel.com/) along with Kale Chesney. No cover, donations gladly accepted. More info: [email protected]
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No Land Line Phone: Please Contact Us by Email
Please note that we do not currently have a working land line phone. Please contact us via email at [email protected] which is checked daily.
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New Grants Approved for the Coming Year
BBCRC is happy to report that we have recently had a number of grants approved to help out our operations in the coming year. This includes support from the California Arts Council, DAF360 Giving Fund and, for a first, the Union Pacific Railroad Foundation Community Ties Giving Program (which will help continue our restoration work on the Shasta 109 Pullman Art Gallery Project). Getting grants like this is only possible because we have been able to demonstrate support from all of our individual supporters — so thank you all!
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Union Pacific Destroys the Black Butte Water Tower
In a sad and frustrating turn of events, Union Pacific destroyed the 100-year-old Black Butte Water Tower today. BBCRC had been working on a proposal to save the water tower and had considerable support from local and regional based UP staff. Unfortunately, the suits in the Legal Department in Omaha, unappreciative of local history and seemingly only concerned about liability, refused to accept our proposal and ordered the demolition. BBCRC was able to save all of the historic wood pieces from the tower. The water tower was the iconic symbol of BBCRC and its loss is being felt deeply in our community.
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Thank You for a Successful 2025 Railroad Days
BBCRC would like to thank everyone – artists, presenters, musicians, organizers, and attendees and financial supporters – who made our 2025 Railroad Days “Migrantes Valientes” event such an incredible success. An estimated 250 people visited BBCRC on Saturday, making this one of our larger events ever, with many others also attending BBCRC sponsored events in Dunsmuir on Friday. Throughout the event we were able to center the issue of migration as a basic human right, to draw connections between railroads and migration, and to provide a counter-narrative to the attacks and vilification of migrants in the current national discourse. While not planned that way, our event ended up being very timely as issues around migration, and resistance to attacks on migrants, exploded into the news in California and the whole nation this month. We are working on documenting the event on our website with photos and other content.
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First Grant from the McConnell Fund
We are excited to have BBCRC be a recipient, for the first time, of a grant from the McConnell Fund of the Community Foundation of the North State. The grant will be used for lighting in our Shasta Car community art space as well as for our boxcar music stage. The grant will also support video and audio recording and playback equipment to help us better document the shows and events occurring at BBCRC.
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Two Grants from The Ford Family Foundation
We are happy to announce the approval of two grants from The Ford Family Foundation (www.tfff.org) to support BBCRC initiatives in 2025 and beyond. One will provide assistance for the ongoing restoration of our Southern Pacific Pullman Car #109, the “Shasta” into a community arts venue. This will be an important boost to our long-running efforts to renovate the Shasta Car and help compliment the funds we have been receiving from individual donors for this project. The second grant will support the “Migrantes Vigilantes” photo and book show (with live music!) planned for Railroad Days during June 13-15, as well as support for the Lao immigrant community in and around Weed, including for their upcoming Lao New Year event on April 5. We are highly appreciative of this support, our first grant awards from The Ford Family Foundation.
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Boxcar Sound System Fundraising Campaign a Success!
Boxcar Sound System Fundraising Campaign a Success! Thank you to everyone who donated to our fundraiser to upgrade the sound system for our boxcar music venue. Between the GoFundMe page and other donations sent in separately, we have met our goal and will be proceeding with upgrading our system this Spring. This will ensure we can continue to host high-quality music at Black Butte for years into the future!
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2024 Year in Review
During 2024, after a period of instability, we successfully transitioned to new resident caretakers, made progress on the expansion of our “Black Butte Station” project installation (laying track, reconstructing the water tank and hooking it up to our solar power), further developed our library, completed a successful round of accessibility improvements, and began a new phase of forest restoration work, focused on our six-acre wetlands zone. We successfully hosted Spring and Fall work parties, our June Railroad Days party, a signpainters convergence and other music shows and open houses. Our music and art shows are reaching a broader audience, including from people in our local area. In the Fall of 2024 we launched a new fundraising campaign for our boxcar music sound system. We have also been trying to expand our base of individual donors who can help support our operating and program costs. Thanks to everyone who visited, contributed your skills and financial resources, we couldn’t do this without our base of far-flung supporters!