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Centralia, Pennsylvania: The Town Above the Surface
Before Centralia became famous for what was burning beneath it, it was defined by the people living above it.
Mention Centralia, Pennsylvania today, and most people immediately think of the underground mine fire, abandoned streets, smoke rising from the earth, and the stretch of old Route 61 that became known as Graffiti Highway.
But that is only one chapter of Centralia’s story.
Long before the fire, Centralia was home.
It was a place where children went to school, families attended church, neighbors gathered on front porches, firefighters protected their community, businesses lined the streets, and generations of families built their lives.
To understand Centralia, we need to remember the town above the surface, not only the fire beneath it.
A Community Built on Coal
Centralia’s story is inseparable from anthracite coal.
Mining began beneath the area in the 1850s and 1860s, creating the enormous network of underground tunnels and chambers that would shape Centralia’s future in ways its early residents could never have imagined.
By 1866–1867, Centralia had become an established coal-mining community in Columbia County. St. Ignatius church and cemetery dates to this early period.
Some of the photographs that survive from these years give us remarkable glimpses into the people and places behind those dates.
The Alexander Rea home was photographed in 1854, and a portrait of Alexander W. Rea dates to 1868. St. Ignatius Church and its rectory were photographed in 1869.
These aren’t pictures of a ghost town.
They are pictures of a community being built.
Centralia Grows
As Centralia grew, so did the institutions that made it a town.
Centralia Public School was built in 1885. By 1890, the town had reached a peak population of approximately 2,700 residents.
A wonderful photograph from the 1890s shows a large group gathered on Locust Mountain—possibly a church group.
Another photograph documents the Centralia Fire Company in 1894, complete with its early firehouse, horses and firefighting equipment.
These images tell a part of Centralia’s history that numbers alone cannot.
They show people.
They show organizations.
They show neighbors.
They show a town that belonged to somebody.
Life on Locust Avenue
One of the most striking photographs in our collection shows Locust Avenue in 1915.
Buildings line both sides of the street. People can be seen along the sidewalks. Homes and businesses stretch into the distance. It looks nothing like the Centralia many visitors know today.
Centralia continued to have its schools, churches, fire company and community institutions through the first half of the twentieth century.
A 1924 photograph documents Centralia’s fire company.
A photograph from 1937 shows Hubert Eicher High School, while another remarkable image captures the interior of St. Ignatius Church in 1951, filled with people.
These photographs are important because they remind us that Centralia’s history didn’t begin in 1962.
By the time the mine fire started, generations had already called this place home.
Then Came 1962
By 1962, Centralia’s population had declined to approximately 1,400 residents, but it remained a functioning community with churches, businesses and multigenerational families. A photograph of Locust Avenue from around 1960 shows cars parked along a busy street and buildings still lining both sides of the road.
Then everything changed.
On May 27, 1962, town workers ignited trash in the municipal dump as part of a cleanup before Memorial Day. Although the fire appeared to have been extinguished, embers continued smoldering underground and entered abandoned mine workings through an unsealed opening.
By that summer, officials realized Centralia had an underground mine fire.
The question was no longer whether there was a fire.
The question was how to stop it.
Years of Attempts to Save Centralia
For years, officials tried.
Between 1962 and 1978, state and federal agencies spent approximately $3.3 million attempting to control the fire.
Engineers constructed what became known as the Fly Ash Barrier, pumping coal-combustion waste into underground chambers in an attempt to stop the fire’s advance. Other projects pumped crushed rock and water into mine voids.
None succeeded.
By the late 1970s, conditions were becoming increasingly visible above ground. Surface temperatures rose, gases increased, and evidence of the underground fire became harder to ignore.
But Centralia was still a community.
In 1977, the federal government funded a new municipal building that housed community services and became a gathering place for heated discussions about Centralia’s future.
Residents weren’t simply waiting for their town to disappear.
They were debating, organizing and fighting over how—or whether—it could be saved.
Centralia Was Still Very Much Alive
One of the most revealing pieces of information in this collection comes from Centralia’s post office.
The Centralia Post Office was built in 1962, opened in November of that year and was dedicated in May 1963. Tom Dempsey served as postmaster for a number of yrs and eventually became an important town historian.
By 1981, its box lobby contained 302 rented post-office boxes, while another 210 families received general delivery.
That means the post office was serving a total of 512 families or households.
That detail matters.
Nearly twenty years after the mine fire began, Centralia wasn’t simply an abandoned place with smoke coming out of the ground.
People were still receiving mail.
They were raising families.
They were going home at night.
And many of them did not want to leave.
The Fight for Centralia
By the early 1980s, Centralia reached a turning point.
Residents publicly demonstrated to save their town, and photographs from 1981 show people carrying signs and demanding that government officials listen to them.
In 1983, federal studies estimated that extinguishing the mine fire could cost more than $663 million. Relocation increasingly appeared to officials to be the more practical solution.
Pennsylvania formally chose relocation as its preferred course.
That same period brought serious problems along Route 61, where subsidence associated with the mine fire caused major damage. Stabilization efforts cost approximately $500,000.
In 1984, Congress appropriated $42 million for voluntary property acquisition and relocation.
Centralia began to empty.
Between 1985 and 1991, 545 residences and businesses were acquired through the relocation program.
House by house and block by block, the physical town began disappearing.
Not Everyone Wanted to Go
Centralia’s decline wasn’t as simple as officials ordering everyone to leave.
Some residents believed the dangers had been exaggerated or could be managed. Others simply did not believe they should have to surrender homes and property that had belonged to their families.
In the early 1990s, a small number of families remained and continued fighting.
In January 1992, condemnation proceedings began against many of the remaining properties. Property owners challenged those actions in court, and the borough itself became involved in litigation.
The legal battles continued into the middle of the decade.
Centralia wasn’t disappearing quietly.
The Road That Became Famous
Route 61 eventually became one of Centralia’s most recognizable landmarks.
A section of the highway was rerouted in the late 1980s because of mine-fire threats and concerns about subsidence. The closed portion later became covered with names, artwork and messages and became internationally known as Graffiti Highway.
For visitors, it became an attraction.
For former residents, however, that road represented something very different.
It ran through a place where people had lived.
That distinction is easy to lose when Centralia is treated only as a curiosity or tourist destination.
From Hometown to “Ghost Town”
During the late 1990s and 2000s, most remaining structures were demolished.
As the physical community disappeared, Centralia’s fame grew.
Books, documentaries, television programs and websites introduced the town to people around the world. Centralia became known as one of America’s most famous ghost towns.
There is a strange irony in that transformation.
As fewer buildings remained to show people what Centralia had been, more people arrived wanting to see what was left.
Some Stayed
Even after decades of relocation and legal battles, a few residents refused to give up their homes.
In 2012, five remaining property owners reached an agreement allowing them to remain in their homes for the rest of their lives, although ownership of the land would ultimately remain with the state.
Into the 2020s, only a handful of occupied homes remained. The municipal building continued to stand, volunteer fire equipment remained in town, and Centralia’s four cemeteries continued to be maintained.
Those cemeteries may be among the most powerful reminders of all.
The buildings can disappear.
The streets can be reclaimed by nature.
But generations of Centralia’s people are still there.
More Than a Ghost Town
Today, visitors can look across Centralia and find it difficult to imagine the community visible in the old photographs.
That is why preserving those photographs and the stories behind them matters.
Look again at Alexander Rea’s home.
Look at the people gathered on Locust Mountain.
Look at the fire company.
Look down Locust Avenue in 1915, 1960 and 1980.
Look inside St. Ignatius Church.
Look at Hubert Eicher High School.
Look at the hundreds of mailboxes in the post office.
And look at the residents holding signs in 1981, fighting for the right to preserve their town.
Together, those images tell Centralia’s real story.
The underground fire is part of that story—an enormous and unavoidable part—but it isn’t the whole story.
Centralia was a hometown before it was a headline.
It was a community before it was a curiosity.
And perhaps the best way to preserve its history is to remember not only what continues to burn beneath the ground, but everything that once existed above the surface.
Centralia, Pennsylvania: a proud past, a lasting story.
Some places fade away, but their stories burn brighter.
Graffiti Highway before and after:
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