The Rebirth of Pennsylvania's Infamous Burning Town

Summary

“There’s not much there anymore, it’s pretty much just a crossroads.” I read the posts online telling me not to bother, but I wanted to go anyway. Certainly I could feel something as we got close: the sense of desperation, of ruin and abandon. So I drove with a small group of friends deep into eastern Pennsylvania—coal country—through towns with names like Frackville, Pottsville, Ashland. Many downtowns had at least one house that had burned to ruin and been left abandoned. It was early June, but clouds covered the sky and we drove through a slight but persistent rain. We were on our way to Centralia, Pennsylvania. The Burning Town. The coal that made this valley famous accreted in layers over tens of thousands of years, organic swamp matter turning first to peat, and then compressed over millennia into billions of tons of anthracite—the densest and most pure form of coal—the stuff that made this region of Pennsylvania famous. Mines first opened here in 1856 and Centralia was incorporated as a town a decade later. Through the years bitter labor disputes broke out over exploitative treatment of the (largely Irish immigrant) miners, leading to regular outbreaks of violence. Add to that the boom and bust cycle of the coal industry—and the environmental desolation and impoverishment of the region—and you end up with a town that is deeply scarred, both literally and metaphorically. But the story that made Centralia famous began in May 1962, when officials set fire to the trash in a local landfill in an open strip-mine pit. This wasn’t the first year they’d done this, and there were firefighters stationed to ensure the blaze didn’t get out of control. After two days, the trash fire seemed to have burned itself out. But this time, for whatever reason (the actual cause was never fully determined), something went wrong. The landfill burn had lit the coal mines beneath the town. A photograph of the burning mine taken during an excavation in 1969. U.S. Bureau of Mines / Public...