The town that no longer is.
It began in1841 when Johnathan Faust opened the Bull’s Head Tavern. Soon after a local coal mining company sent in their engineer to lay out streets and lots for development. The town was known as Centerville until 1865 when the post office was established and it then became Centralia.
The anthracite coal industry was the principle employer in the community as with most of that region of Pennsylvania. It lasted until the 1960’s when many of the legitimate mining companies went out of business although bootleg mining continued until the early 1980’s. Strip and open-pit mining are still active in the area today.
Why am I bothering you with this? Stick with me and you’ll find out. In its heyday, Centralia proper had over 2000 residents with another 600 or so scattered around the outskirts of town. There was a school district with an additional Catholic school, five hotels, two theaters, a bank, seven churches, fourteen stores, and twenty-seven saloons. And the post office.
Do you know what’s there now, where Centralia once was? Five houses and one church. The government razed everything that didn’t burn or collapse on its own, including the post office after the zip code was revoked in 2002 when they officially dissolved the borough.
So what happened? From what I could find there was a town dump located on the sight of an abandoned strip mine. Every year before the big Memorial day celebration the town’s volunteer fire company would burn it off. You know, to spruce it up a bit. Only it seems in 1962 it wasn’t fully extinguished. The fire continued to smolder in the bottom of the heap and it ignited the vein of coal running beneath the town.
There were a few mediocre attempts to douse it, all unsuccessful but it doesn’t appear that
anyone was overly concerned with the fire until 1979 when a local gas station owner noticed the temperature of the gasoline in the underground storage tanks was alarmingly high. Statewide attention increased even further in 1981 after a boy nearly died when a sinkhole opened up under him. If his cousin hadn’t been right there to quickly haul him out of it, he would have been scalded to death be the steam, it was that hot.
After that, all sorts of things happened. Route 61, the main road through Centralia buckled and
collapsed several times until eventually the state stopped repairing it. They rerouted the road instead since it really wasn’t safe to drive through the town anyway. I used to go snowmobiling in the early 80’s and I remember driving through there. It always fascinated me, seeing the steam rising out of the cracks in the ground. All the trees where dead around them, killed by the gases. They were white too, like ghost sentinels of what was. By then they’d started knocking down building which gave the town an eerie feel as if it were dying little by little. It was only I didn’t know it at the time.
Anyway surveys were done and options were evaluated. Solutions were proposed. Some were tried. Unsuccessfully. It was a situation of too little, too late. In the end it cost Pennsylvania around $42 million to relocate just about everyone back in 1984. In 1992, the state claimed eminent domain on all properties and condemned all the buildings within the borough although last year there were still a handful remaining with the diehards that refuse to leave. As you already know, as of 2002, according to the federal government, Centralia ceased to exist.
Oh, so you know, the alternative, putting out the fire, had an estimated cost of $663 million. I guess that justifies letting it burn itself out. However we don’t really know the long-term ramifications of this, do we? The article I read suggests it will take 250 years for the coal to be exhausted. The studies done on the deposits around the vent pipes that have been installed resemble those taken in areas of volcanic activity. We already know what this fire has done to the families that have been displaced but what is it doing to the environment?
Centralia since the 80’s. It’s amazing how nature is reclaiming the area, fire or no fire. If you didn’t know there used to be a fair-sized town there you’d have no idea. Most of the strip mine pits are grown over too.
