When I was a kid, as I sat in the classroom of my now-a-park elementary school, I tried to figure out the rulers on the wall.  Elm Grove, the school, was really just a long hallway.  Fifth graders at one end, kindergarten at the other.  I made my way up from one end to the other, all the while figuring that the rulers were holding the school together. 

Really, they were measuring the mine subsidence cracks.  They appeared a couple of years before I started there.   Turns out Montour Mine had flooded and started to cave.  Insurance companies wouldn't pay, of course, because it wasn't an Act of God, but manmade.  Course, I kept going in, every day for six years after they saw the first cracks.  They ended up razing the old gal a couple years later.  She stood for only thirty some years. 

Ah, anthracite coal.  Black diamonds.   Right.  About 4 hours from here is where anthracite coal got started here in the states.  Pottsville, Pennslyvania.  Legend has it Necho Allen, a hunter, or some say a farmer, stumbled upon it.  Someone else would have done it, sure, but strange to think we were might have been had that day never happened.  So.  Necho.  Well, depending on who you ask, the story goes something like this: He did battle with a panther, and presumably won.  Sat down afterward at the lull of the mountain and lit up a fire to rest and recover from the mauling he'd taken.  Dozed off in his buckskins and coonskin cap.  A Quaker trader from from the City of Brotherly Love had seen a glow in the distance and climbed to the camp site to wake ol' Necho, who explained he had set a campfire and "several hours later I was awakened by summer-like heat. . . . Then I saw that the solid earth all about me seemed to be afire."  I think it's more likely that he woke up scared to death, but hey, that kind of stuff doesn't sit well with local legends.  Pottsville, incidentally, also gave us Yuengling and the Pottsville Maroons.

20 minutes from there, underground, rests The Mammoth.  That's what they call the richest known anthracite vein in the world. 

And another 20 minutes from there is Centralia.  Centralia is, well, the stuff movies are made of.  It's got it all: disaster, heroics, death, secret societies, corporatism, conspiracy theories, outlaws.  And so on. 

Being from Pennsylvania, I've been regaled with stories of working in the mines and the mills for years.  If the steel mills were Hell's Inferno, the mines were the Gates. 

1841, guy named J. Faust built a tavern in what would become Centralia.  Called it The Bull's Head.  He didn't own the land, and to build the place he, "appropriated the timber without compunction."  That tavern was Centralia, at that point.  He sold the place about 9 years later, but the tavern ended up being part of Main Street, and the local watering hole. 1855.  Guy named Alexander Rea comes into town.  The first engineer from Locust Mountain colliery, he fixed himself up with an apartment above the tavern, and set about laying plans for streets and lots for the new town.  In 1865, they laid rail through the town and people started to come in, looking for work in the mines.  Rea stuck around and worked as superintendent of the mines. 

It was a bustling little mining town in its heyday.  The town was dotted with twenty saloons, five churches, a convent, and a polka dance hall, among other things.  A saloon for every 200 people, the town was known for, at one point. 

About three years after they laid the rail, Alexander Rea's body was found in the bushes on the road between Centralia and Mount Carmel. 

Ah, but I've skipped something.  Around the time of the Civil War, up through the 1870s, the Molly Maguires were at the height of their fame in the region.   No one can say much with certitude about the Mollys.  I've got a vivid imagination and a tendency to side with the Irish.  But I'll let you decide. 

3 Mollys were pegged with Rea's murder.  Which mind you, wasn't the first.  6 murders in the region up to that point, all pegged on Maguireism.  Damn near anyone who spoke of unions back then was pegged as a Molly.  (If you have access to the historical NY Times, check out some of the old articles on it. Great stuff.)

Rough and Tumble Centralia. 

Most of that died down after the 1870s.  Unions were starting to form and after the big Molly executions, well...who really knows.  History is nothing but a mystery anyway, no matter what we tell ourselves.

Fast forward a little less than a century.

1954.  The company that owned most of Centralia's coal deeded it to the town.  For one dollar.

8 years later the fire started.  There's some debate over how, but basically the incineration of trash crept down into the abandoned labyrinth of mines that Centralia sat on.  It spread through the vein and the nooks and crannies created by bootleg mining over the years.  It's been burning ever since then.  Some say it will burn for another 50, 100, 200 years.  Seems anyone's guess to me.  That mountain Down Under has been burning for somewhere between two to six thousand years.  Steam and smoke seeps out of the ground, holes, and roads in Centralia.  Roads are shredded from the fire. 

Valentine's Day. 1981.  I was somewhere between a twinkle in the eye of my parents and those first school days staring at those rulers, a few months from being born.

A group of men showed up in Centralia that day, and, being a small town like any small town, people noticed.  Carrie called her daughter Florence who sent her 12 year old kid Todd out to see what was up.  I've been sent on those types of missions before.  Hell, we had one lady in our neighborhood who just stood at the window with binoculars half the day.  Suburbia and small town life can do that to you, I guess.  So this kid goes out to check it out, cuts through the yards, stops to check out something on the motorbike his cousin is working on, and keeps going.  He saw some smoke coming from the ground and did what most curious kids would do: went to check it out.  And the ground opened up and almost swallowed him.  He grabbed the roots of the trees, screamed for help, and his cousin came over and pulled him out.  Whole thing lasted about 45 seconds, and they stumbled through the door of the grandma's house.  She figured out what had happened, and then sent the cousin to find out who the men were.  Cause you know, she still didn't know. 

Turns out to be the Congressman and the group of politicians and officials who had come to talk about the mine fire.  Irony, eh?

Today there are about 10 residents left in Centralia.  As a 2004 Harper's article put it:

In the papers, Centralians had become a stubborn breed with "stubborn offspring" who, despite a "vast," "huge," "gigantic," and "spreading" fire that had poisoned people with gases and tried to eat a child, "refused to acknowledge their impending doom." "The remaining old timers," reported the Times of London, "just laugh!"

Maybe that's just the power of home. 

Couple of guys made a movie about the fire last year.  Or, two years, I guess it now is.  They called it The Town that Was.

But, there's a lot of towns like that around here.  Towns that were. And everywhere.  They've all got their stories.  

This isn't where I thought I'd end up when I started writing.  I thought it might go somewhere into the havoc wrought by mining.  The many things we've done wrong in the name of progress.  It started with me putzing around looking for abandoned buildings and ghost towns to haunt, when I stumbled into Centralia and back to the 19^th century and met some Molly Maguires.  C'est la vie.  Sometimes you start walking and end up somewhere better than your destination.