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GREENSBORO - Two paths converged in a not-so-distant wood this week: the $26 million Downtown Greenway, and a longtime homeless “tent city” in its way.

Served notice that heavy equipment will soon be brought in for soil sampling, five homeless men and a woman retreated to an adjoining section of woods near the Freeman Mill Road overpass at Spring Garden Street, according to police and Action Greensboro, the nonprofit project manager.

“They told us we had to go — tents and everything,” said Keith Owens, 45, an unemployed equipment operator who has lived at the camp for a year. “They did give us a little bit of warning. Anybody dreads moving. It’s just a little harder out here.”

Ted Partrick, an engineer for the city, said soil drilling tests will start any day now, to check for rock before this section of the job is put out for bids.

The 4.2-mile loop, connecting neighborhoods with a scenic bike and walking trail, will cut through a number of once overgrown and neglected areas. But coordinator Dabney Sanders said this is the only section where homeless people lived in the planned path.

Even though the camp is only two blocks from City Hall, it is secluded from view on 4 acres of railroad right-of-way, near a concrete company. There, homeless people pitch tents and build campfires — things they cannot do under bridges.

“We didn’t realize the extent of who was living there in the beginning,” Sanders said. “Historically, it has been a safe place for people, and a close-knit, self-policing community.”

Last summer, 15 men and two women lived at the Freeman Mill camp, according to the outreach group StreetWatch. But by this week, as March brought yet another snow, only the six remained.

For the short term, they simply broke camp and crossed a chain link fence to adjoining property, where the Mitchell family leases out an AM radio tower and a billboard.

The clearing, in contrast to the woods, offers less cover, leaving the tents exposed.

“It’s quieter on the other side. Here, when the train passes, it vibrates you,”Owens shouted Friday as a Norfolk-Southern train clattered close by his makeshift campsite.

“And the wind wasn’t so bad over there. Tuesday, when it was snowing, it kept putting our fire out.”

Elliot Mitchell, whose family has long owned the WKEW tower property, doesn’t mind the homeless camping on his land. Still, he said he would like to see efforts to improve the greenway also extend to improving the lot of its former inhabitants.

“I wasn’t upset. They need somewhere to go,” said Mitchell, who discovered a previous camp a year ago when he spotted a campfire. “They’re pretty much down on their luck, and keeping to themselves. Ideally, maybe we can find another place for them to stay.”

That, in a nutshell, is the objective for StreetWatch outreach workers, who have seen the chronically homeless struggle through a particularly harsh winter.

“I want that camp emptied out,” said StreetWatch co-founder Audrie Keen, “but not just to the next patch of woods. We want to get sponsors and housing vouchers. These are good people. These are my friends. We have to take it one by one.”

Sgt. Bud Blaylock, a supervisor with the Central Division who routinely checks on the downtown homeless, said the camp has been there for at least 20 years. He remembers walking the railway bed as a rookie and taking Polaroid photos of the tent city for training.

He feared that displacement could result in some homeless slipping out of sight, but observed that many have formidable survival skills.

“It’s been a strange winter. It’s shown the severity of homelessness in Greensboro, but it’s also shown the resources we can put together,” Blaylock said. “We need to get rolling. I mean you, me as individuals, the government entities and the nonprofits.”

Blaylock estimates there are several hundred homeless in the downtown area alone, living in tents, cars, vacant houses and under bridges or loading docks. Once the city’s planned homeless day center opens next year, housing advocates believe services will be more centralized.

At the moment, it is hit-or-miss, depending on the individual initiative of the beat cop and the community. This was particularly true after the state budget crisis reduced staff positions and funds for the Housing Support Teams initiative that helped street people into housing.

The fallout? Take, for example, the case of a Montagnard man who apparently suffered a traumatic brain injury and spent the winter under a bridge at North Elm Street near Moses Cone Hospital.

Blaylock, after placing several calls to Montagnard-Dega groups and veterans foundations, found housing for the man at a Randolph County farm the Montagnard own.

At the Freeman Mill camp, the winter also exacted a toll. Shortly after a front-page story about the camp in the News & Record on Jan. 10, Jong Sugg, 60, was hospitalized with a severe respiratory condition and Mark Stinson, 50, was hospitalized after accidentally burning his hand in the campfire.

According to StreetWatch, Sugg is awaiting a Housing First voucher for an apartment, but Stinson will be homeless again as soon as his hand heals. Stinson, an unemployed maintenance man, said he had stayed at Greensboro Urban Ministry in the past, but that it was too soon for him to return, under shelter rules.

Last week, students at Guilford College began raising money in an effort to sponsor Stinson until he can qualify for housing and find work.

Contact Lorraine Ahearn at 373-7334 or lorraine.ahearn@news-record.com