Centralia, Pennsylvania: The Town Above a Fire That Won’t Go Out

Centralia, in Columbia County in the anthracite coal region of eastern Pennsylvania, was incorporated as a borough in 1866 and grew into an ordinary mining town built directly atop some of the richest hard-coal seams in the country. Its population peaked at roughly 2,700 around 1890 and had settled to about 1,000 by 1980, supporting churches, schools, a business district, and the close-knit institutions typical of Pennsylvania coal country. For nearly a century it was unremarkable — until the ground beneath it caught fire.

In May 1962 a fire, most widely attributed to the burning of trash in a former strip-mine pit being used as the borough landfill, reached an exposed anthracite seam and spread underground into the abandoned network of mines that honeycombed the area. Anthracite burns slowly, hot, and persistently, and the fire found a virtually unlimited fuel supply in the very coal that had given the town its livelihood. Repeated attempts to extinguish or contain it — flushing, trenching, and excavation — failed or were judged too costly, and the fire continued to spread for years beneath homes, streets, and the cemetery.

The consequences turned lethal and visible over time. Ground temperatures rose, steam and smoke vented from cracks in roads and yards, and dangerous levels of carbon monoxide and other gases seeped into basements. The crisis reached the national consciousness in February 1981, when a 12-year-old boy named Todd Domboski nearly fell to his death into a sudden, steaming sinkhole that opened beneath him; he was saved by a cousin. Faced with an underground fire that could not be put out at any acceptable cost, the federal government acted not to fix the town but to remove it.

In 1984 Congress appropriated roughly $42 million to relocate residents, and most accepted buyouts and left. In 1992 Pennsylvania condemned the remaining properties under eminent domain, and in 2002 the U.S. Postal Service revoked the town’s ZIP code, 17927. A handful of holdouts fought to stay, and a 2013 legal settlement allowed the last few residents to live out their lives in their homes. The mine fire is still burning and may continue for many decades — by some estimates more than a century — making Centralia a rare case of a town destroyed not by depletion or economic shift but by its own resource turned permanently hazardous.

Thurmond, West Virginia: The Coal Depot the Diesel Engine Killed

Thurmond was a railroad and coal town wedged onto a narrow shelf of land in the New River Gorge of southern West Virginia, built almost entirely to serve the Chesapeake & Ohio Railway as it hauled bituminous coal out of the New River and Winding Gulf coalfields. Founded around 1900 on land controlled by coal operator Thomas G. McKell — and named for Captain William Dabney Thurmond, who had patented the original tract — the town existed because steam locomotives needed a place to take on coal and water and to assemble the long trains of loaded hoppers that the gorge produced.

At its height in the 1910s and early 1920s Thurmond was one of the busiest freight points on the entire C&O system. During the first two decades of the 20th century the town reportedly produced more freight tonnage than Cincinnati and Richmond combined, and roughly fifteen passenger trains a day passed through, the depot handling about 75,000 passengers a year — all with almost no road access, the railroad tracks serving quite literally as the main street. Two banks, including the National Bank of Thurmond, two hotels, stores, and offices crowded the narrow strip between the cliff and the river.

Thurmond’s prosperity, however, was bound tightly to a single technology and a single commodity. Steam locomotives required frequent coaling and watering stops, which is precisely what gave a place like Thurmond its reason to exist; the diesel-electric locomotives that railroads adopted from the 1940s onward did not. As diesels eliminated the need for division-point servicing and the long decline of Appalachian coal cut traffic further, the town’s economic logic simply evaporated.

Today Thurmond survives as a near-empty historic district inside New River Gorge National Park and Preserve, and the entire town is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The 1904 depot has been restored by the National Park Service as a seasonal visitor center, just five residents remained as of the 2020 census — making Thurmond the least-populous municipality in West Virginia — and the town stands as one of the clearest American examples of a settlement obsoleted not by a depleted mine beneath it but by a change in the machines that passed through it.