A Ghostly Fire: The Borough of Centralia, Pennsylvania
Centralia, Pennsylvania is one of those places where the popular story can easily become more interesting than the history itself, as evidenced by its plight being the basis for the first Silent Hill movie, in an attempt to explain the area fog, more famously a motif of the video game series.
| Image of Locust Av in Centralia, PA, c. 1960. Unknown photographer, local archives. |
A town catches fire beneath the ground, a highway buckles and cracks, most of the residents leave, and a handful of people remain. The result is usually described as a ghost town. While Centralia is the most famous example, underground coal fires are not uncommon across the world. The Jharia Coal Field in India, for example, has been burning for over 100 years.
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| Centralia, PA on the Ashland USGS 1947 Topo Map with various Lehigh Valley Railroad lines. PA 61 is labeled as US 122, which was an intrastate US Highway until 1963. |
But Centralia was not simply abandoned overnight, and the fire was not a single event that the authorities failed to extinguish once or twice. It became a decades-long problem involving underground mine workings, repeated attempts at control, property acquisition, relocation, condemnation, and eventually a legal settlement that allowed a few residents to remain in the Borough for the rest of their lives.
As of the 2020 Census, five residents still call Centralia home.
The Town Before the Fire
Centralia was a coal town long before it became famous for the fire beneath it. A settlement known as Bull's Head, later called Centreville, developed here before Centralia was incorporated as a borough in February 1866. Coal had already been mined in the area since 1842, and the Centralia Colliery opened in 1862.
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| From the Lykens Valley blog, "A photograph showing the water-level tunnel entrance of the Centralia Colliery as it appeared in the 1890s." |
The town sat above the Buck Mountain coal bed and was associated with the Lehigh Valley Coal Company. Like many Pennsylvania coal communities, Centralia developed into a conventional borough with streets, homes, churches, a school, a fire company, and a cemetery on the hill above town. According to the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection's historical material, the population was still more than 1,000 people in the mid-1950s.
How the Fire Began
The origin of the Centralia mine fire is often presented as settled fact, but the state's own record is more cautious.
The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection says the fire reportedly began as an intentional burning of residential trash in an abandoned strip pit. The pit had been excavated around 1935 and was approximately 75 feet wide and 50 feet deep. The state's explanation is that the pit did not have a properly constructed non-combustible shale barrier. That allowed the fire to reach carbonaceous refuse and eventually the coal workings below.
That word, reportedly, matters. The DEP's own account does not claim that the precise ignition sequence is known beyond doubt. Later accounts have often treated the trash-burning explanation as an established fact, but the official record is more qualified. It's more of a Mrs. O'Leary's cow situation, unfortunately, as the ignition point of many fires can be difficult, if not impossible, to accurately track.
By August 1962, only weeks after the fire began, its effects were already being felt beyond the immediate area.
The Shamokin News-Dispatch reported on August 14 that Clarence E. Kashner, president of the Independent Miners, Breakermen and Truckers of Shamokin, was pressing state officials to act. Kashner reported that 203 miners were already idle and that 27 small mines had curtailed operations because smoke, fumes, and heat were entering the workings.
Kashner had approached the State Department of Mines, where Secretary of Mines Lewis Evans was reportedly seeking authority to begin work quickly. Three state assemblymen, John Stank, Adam Bower, and George Heffner, had also promised assistance. Kashner identified the borough's sanitary landfill as the likely source of the fire and argued that future landfills should be located so that they could not ignite abandoned mine workings.
This early newspaper account is particularly useful because it shows that the Centralia fire was already being treated as a regional mining and public-safety problem in the summer of 1962, long before the town became nationally famous.
Years of Trying to Stop the Fire
Stopping the fire proved much harder than identifying the problem.
From 1962 through 1978, state and federal governments spent approximately $3.3 million on efforts to control it. Crews drilled boreholes, pumped water into the underground workings, constructed trenches across the coal seam, and attempted to fill portions of the mine with fly ash.
The difficulty was the underground mine itself. The fire could move through abandoned chambers and workings, bypassing the areas where crews were attempting to contain it. A solution that appeared to work in one location did not necessarily stop the fire from continuing somewhere else.
One commonly repeated detail is that firefighters and officials made eight separate attempts to extinguish the fire. That figure appears in David DeKok's reporting and books, but it is not presented as a numbered total in the DEP chronology. It is therefore better understood as a reported figure rather than as an official state count.
From Fighting the Fire to Moving the Town
By the late 1970s and early 1980s, the question was becoming less about whether the fire could be stopped cheaply and more about what would happen to the people living above it.
Between 1979 and 1982, the federal Office of Surface Mining acquired 34 properties affected by the fire and commissioned a study of its potential spread. The state also began monitoring air quality.
In 1983, the federal study estimated that completely extinguishing the fire could cost approximately $663 million. That estimate fundamentally changed the scale of the problem. Extinguishing the fire was no longer a relatively small engineering project.
That same year, subsidence damaged Route 61, an important highway connection through the area. The state spent roughly half a million dollars stabilizing the roadway. In 1984, Congress appropriated more than $42 million for voluntary acquisition and relocation of affected homes and businesses, with the state administering the program.
Between 1985 and 1991, 545 residences and businesses were acquired and their occupants relocated. In January 1992, the Centralia Task Force, operating under the Office of Surface Mining, moved from voluntary acquisitions toward condemnation proceedings. The stated concerns included noxious gases and subsidence.
I wish there was a way to take advantage of the fact that a huge energy source is burning beneath the Borough, as it could be an incredible source of hybridized coal/geothermal electricity. It seems so incredibly wasteful to let it burn itself out.
When a Town Can Still Exist Without Much of a Town
One of the strangest milestones in Centralia's history came in 2002, when the United States Postal Service discontinued the town's ZIP code, 17927.
That did not legally erase Centralia. The borough continued to exist. But it was another sign of how much of the ordinary infrastructure of community life had disappeared.
The Fight Over the Last Residents
The relocation process did not end with the demolition of most of Centralia.
By the late 2000s, only a small number of property owners remained. In 2010, seven residents filed a federal lawsuit seeking to stop the condemnation of their properties. They argued, among other things, that the fire did not pose the level of danger claimed by the state and that the condemnation process was connected to potential coal access.
The litigation narrowed over time. In 2012, Judge Matthew W. Brann dismissed six of the seven plaintiffs from the case after finding their claims time-barred. John Koschoff remained because his case had been filed within the applicable period. The Third Circuit Court of Appeals later affirmed the refusal to block the condemnations.
In October 2013, the remaining dispute was settled. The residents agreed to give up their opposition to the condemnation in exchange for life estates allowing them to remain in their homes for the rest of their lives. The properties were transferred through quitclaim deeds, meaning the residents could remain but no longer owned the underlying land in the ordinary sense or have the ability to pass it on as an inheritable property interest.
The contemporary reports do not all agree on the exact number of residents covered by the settlement or the total amount paid. PennLive reported seven property owners and $218,000, while other contemporary and later accounts have described the group differently and have cited a larger total. The important point is consistent across the accounts: the last holdouts received the legal right to remain for life rather than retaining ordinary ownership of the properties.
Route 61 and the Graffiti Highway
Centralia's underground fire eventually became visible in one of the most memorable ways possible: the highway itself began to fail.
The old alignment of PA 61 was closed in 1993 after the pavement buckled and cracked as a result of subsidence. Traffic was rerouted onto another road, leaving the damaged section abandoned. We originally discussed the plight of PA 61 in our 5 Historic Roads You Can No Longer Drive On blog.
People began visiting the closed highway. Over time, its pavement became covered with graffiti, and the abandoned road acquired a new name: the Graffiti Highway.
For years, the road became an unofficial attraction, even though the underlying fire and unstable ground remained serious hazards. Unfortunately, this is one Centralia relic that is no longer accessible. In April 2020, the landowner, Fox Coal Company, buried the abandoned highway under roughly 400 truckloads of dirt. The company cited trespassing, litter, and the large crowds that had gathered there, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Centralia Today
The fire has never been completely extinguished. Steam and gases continue to escape from fissures in the ground, and the underground workings still contain coal that can sustain combustion.
Yet Centralia is not entirely gone.
The cemetery is still maintained. The borough still exists. Municipal infrastructure remains. A replacement highway carries traffic around the old Route 61 alignment. And a small number of people have continued to identify Centralia as home.
It is certainly a drastically diminished community, but it never simply stopped existing. Its population declined over decades as homes were acquired, demolished, and abandoned. The fire continued underground while the town gradually became something very different from the place that existed before 1962.
Centralia is therefore less a story about a town that disappeared than about a town that was slowly dismantled around a problem that proved extraordinarily difficult to remove.
The underground coal seam is expected to continue burning for well over two hundred years, meaning that even as the town itself has nearly disappeared, the fire that transformed Centralia will remain part of the landscape for centuries. Buildings may vanish, roads may be reclaimed, and the remaining residents may eventually be gone, but the coal beneath Centralia will continue to burn slowly underground. In that sense, Centralia's story is not quite over. The town may be disappearing from the map, but the force that caused its disappearance is likely to outlast it by generations.
Sources
Primary and Official Records
- Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, Centralia Mine Fire Resources, including the state's account of the fire's origin and the chronology of control, acquisition, and relocation efforts.
- The DEP chronology as reproduced by WGAL.
- Shamokin News-Dispatch, August 14, 1962, “Independents Ask Quick Action on Region Mine Fire,” reporting on the early economic and mining impacts of the fire.
- Centralia Mine Fire Collection, SC-18, 1860–2006, Columbia County Historical Society.
- U.S. Census Bureau, 2020 Census population count for Centralia Borough.
Reporting and Historical Analysis
- PennLive, John Beauge, October 2013, reporting on the federal condemnation settlement.
- Associated Press, October 2013, reporting on the final Centralia residents and life-tenancy settlement.
- Bloomsburg Press Enterprise / Times News, April 2020, reporting on the burial of Route 61 and the former Graffiti Highway.
- David DeKok, Unseen Danger (1986) and Fire Underground: The Ongoing Tragedy of the Centralia Mine Fire (2009).
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