refined into lucrative products like paraffin and kerosene. Western Pennsylvania boomed
inordinately. In three months, as John McPhee notes in In Suspect Terrain, the
endearingly named Pithole City went from a population of zero to 15,000, and other
towns throughout the region sprang up--Oil City, Petroleum Center, Red Hot. John Wilkes
Booth came and lost his savings, then went off to kill a president, but others stayed and
made a fortune.
For one lively half century Pennsylvania had a virtual monopoly on one of the most
valuable products in the world, oil, and an overwhelmingly dominant role in the
production of a second, coal. Because of the proximity of rich supplies of fuel, the state
became the center of big, fuel-intensive industries like steelmaking and chemicals. Lots of
people became colossally rich.
But not the mineworkers. Mining has of course always been a wretched line of work
everywhere, but nowhere more so than in the United States in the second half of the
nineteenth century. Thanks to immigration, miners were infinitely expendable. When the
Welsh got belligerent, you brought in Irish. When they failed to satisfy, you brought in
Italians or Poles or Hungarians. Workers were paid by the ton, which both encouraged
them to hack out coal with reckless haste and meant that any labor they expended
making their environment safer or more comfortable went uncompensated. Mine shafts
were bored through the earth like holes through Swiss cheese, often destabilizing whole
valleys. In 1846 at Carbon-dale almost fifty acres of mine shafts collapsed simultaneously
without warning, claiming hundreds of lives. Explosions and flash fires were common.
Between 1870 and the outbreak of the First World War, 50,000 people died in American
mines.
The great irony of anthracite is that, tough as it is to light, once you get it lit it's nearly
impossible to put out. Stories of uncontrolled mine fires are legion in eastern
Pennsylvania. One fire at Lehigh started in 1850 and didn't burn itself out until the Great
Depression--eighty years after it started.
And thus we come to Centralia. For a century, Centralia was a sturdy little pit
community. However difficult life may have been for the early miners, by the second half
of the twentieth century Centralia was a reasonably prosperous, snug, hardworking town
with a population approaching 2,000. It had a thriving business district, with banks and a
post office and the normal range of shops and small department stores, a high school,
four churches, an Odd Fellows Club, a town hall--in short, a typical, pleasant, contentedly
anonymous small American town.
Unfortunately, it also sat on twenty-four million tons of anthracite. In 1962, a fire in a
dump on the edge of town ignited a coal seam. The fire department poured thousands of
gallons of water on the fire, but each time they seemed to have it extinguished it came
back, like those trick birthday candles that go out for a moment and then spontaneously
reignite. And then, very slowly, the fire began to eat its way along the subterranean
seams. Smoke began to rise eerily from the ground over a wide area, like steam off a lake
at dawn. On Highway 61, the pavement grew warm to the touch, then began to crack and
settle, rendering the road unusable. The smoking zone passed under the highway and
fanned out through a neighboring woodland and up towards St. Ignatius Catholic Church
on a knoll above the town.
sean pound
(Sean Pound)
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