Unattended Death and Biohazard Cleanup in Greenville, CA

Greenville is an unincorporated community and census-designated place in Plumas County, on the northwest side of Indian Valley in the northern Sierra Nevada.

The Northeast Maidu people called the place Kotassi, and Maidu families had lived in the valley for centuries before English-speaking settlers arrived in the 1850s during the Gold Rush.

Greenville was named for Mr. Green, who with his wife ran one of the settlement's first boarding houses and was killed in the collapse of the first Round Valley Dam.

When Henry C. Bidwell arrived in 1862 and opened a trading post, several business owners moved down from Round Valley to Greenville, and mining and logging became the town's main industries.

In the late 1800s the federal government granted the Maidu more than 200 acres at Greenville, where an Indian boarding school stood until it burned in the 1920s; the land later became the Greenville Rancheria, and the tribe is still headquartered in town.

Greenville burned once before in its early days - a fire destroyed many of its buildings in 1881, when the town had about 500 people, and it was quickly rebuilt.

On August 4, 2021, the Dixie Fire destroyed about 75 percent of Greenville's buildings, including its library and fire department - and the Dixie Fire, at 963,309 acres, was the largest single wildfire in California history.

Plumas County's recovery planning counts 375 residential and 280 non-residential structures damaged or destroyed in Greenville, and the town has been rebuilding under a county recovery strategy adopted in January 2025.

Greenville's population was 1,026 in the 2020 census, counted the year before the fire, down from 1,129 in 2010, living in 491 households with an average size of 2.09 people.

Greenville's students attend Indian Valley Elementary School and Greenville Junior/Senior High School in the Plumas Unified School District - the elementary teams are the Wolf Pack and the high school teams are the Indians.