Centralias Cannot Hold

A couple of notes before we get to the actual blog post:

1. One of the first times I realized history wasn’t fixed came when I was a reporter at the Montesano Vidette. I was in my early 20s, still taking weekend classes at Evergreen. The Vidette was caught between eras—part hands-on production, part digital. We’d print our computer-written stories in column width, then cut and paste them onto pages before sending them off to the printer in Shelton. Just a few feet from our front door sat a century of bound newspaper editions. Every week, a handful of historians, history buffs, and family genealogists came by with spiral-bound notebooks and pencils to take notes from those oversized volumes.

One afternoon, an older woman arrived with an overstuffed backpack. She’d taken the bus up from Lewis County, connecting through Olympia. I was killing time before heading to the Elma City Council meeting when I noticed she had several volumes open, covering 1918 through 1923. She was searching for traces of a relative involved in the Centralia Massacre, back when Wobblies clashed with the American Legion.

What stuck with me most, though, was seeing her again later that night in Elma. Before the council meeting began, she approached the city clerk to ask if she could examine city records. She was catching the last bus out of Grays Harbor but had seen the city hall lights on and decided to stop. The clerk said no, and the police chief—who always attended council meetings, handed her a coupon for a hotel room and the bus out in the morning.

Here was someone, retired, without the money to drive, so convinced the official story of American Legionnaires bravely fending off Wobbly attackers was wrong that she hiked and bused her way to dig through the record. The Centralia Massacre is still debated today. If you don’t know the ins and outs, you can still follow along here. You don’t need to be a historian. But the story is fascinating. And, much like the legend of Marcus Whitman, the “official” tale is a heroic cover over a much deeper, messier truth about our region.

2. For obvious reasons, I’ve also been thinking about the opening stanza of Yeats’ The Second Coming:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

There are endless reflections to draw from this poem, most circling back to the idea that history doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme. Yeats had just witnessed the devastation of the Great War and the collapse of centuries of British rule in Ireland. An old order (unjust though it was) was giving way to violent disorder. His imagery: paths spinning away from the center, blood in the water, a beast slouching toward Bethlehem, captures both dread and inevitability. History was turning, but not toward salvation.

Centralias

There are a lot of Centralias in the United States. Twelve, as best I can tell. Fargo, North Dakota, used to be a Centralia, but changed its name. If you trace five of these Centralias (Missouri, Oklahoma, Washington, Illinois, and Pennsylvania), you can run a bloody finger across American history since the Civil War.

1864: Centralia, Missouri

Not at the forefront of the campaigns in Virginia or the Mississippi Delta, Centralia, Missouri, was caught in the deeper, revenge-fueled violence that marked the darker history of the Civil War. On September 27, 1864, Confederate guerrillas led by William “Bloody Bill” Anderson (joined by a young Jesse James) launched the Centralia Massacre. They boarded a train, separated 24 Union soldiers on leave, and executed them. It did not stop there. The guerrillas looted the town, torched the train, and set fire to the depot.

The Missouri front of the war was an irregular backwater, but it carried the legacy of Bleeding Kansas, and its violence was no less savage.

Later that same day, a Union force of 146 inexperienced mounted infantry was sent to intercept Anderson’s men. The clash became the Battle of Centralia. But if not for the earlier massacre, this too might have been called a massacre. The Union troops were severely outmatched and overrun. Anderson’s fighters killed 123 soldiers, nearly annihilating the detachment. By the end of the day, 147 Union casualties had marked Centralia as a site of wartime horror. Observers at the time called it an “inhuman slaughter” and one of the “chief barbarisms of the war.”

The massacre was not an isolated event but part of the escalating cycle of frontier violence that began with Bleeding Kansas in the 1850s. Confederate guerrillas sought revenge against federal forces who had occupied the Missouri-Kansas borderlands. Union responses were just as brutal: Brigadier General Clinton B. Fisk suggested “depopulation and devastation” in retribution, citing earlier expulsions of border residents under General Ewing’s orders. The violence was reciprocal, entrenched, and unrelenting.

1901: Centralia, Oklahoma

After the Civil War came emancipation, Reconstruction, and then its collapse. Jim Crow laws and sundown towns spread across the nation, systems of racial control maintained by violence, and sometimes resisted by violence.

That resistance flared in Centralia, Oklahoma, in October 1901.

White residents tried to drive Black families out of town one night. A group of white men attacked the home of a Black resident, Whitmitre, firing into the roof and forcing his family to flee into the dark.

In response, Black townspeople armed themselves. Shots rang out along the streets, and white residents barricaded themselves inside their homes. In the chaos, a white woman was shot. The Black residents’ message was clear: they would not be driven out. Federal authorities later arrived and suppressed the uprising, arresting one Black man for shooting the woman.

Centralia was not the only place where white people forcibly removed residents based on race. But it is one of the few where people of color stood up and fought back.

1919: Centralia, Washington

This is the one most people around here know.

On November 11, 1919, a parade to celebrate the end of World War I, a year before, erupted into bloodshed. The Centralia Massacre (sometimes called the Centralia Conspiracy, Riot, or Tragedy) pitted the American Legion against the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, or “Wobblies”).

The massacre grew out of long-standing tensions between the Wobblies and a coalition of local business owners, the American Legion, and government officials. The IWW pushed for all workers to unite as a class, take control of production, and challenge the capitalist system. They often used “direct action” tactics like strikes and public speeches to make their point. Their anti-war stance during World War I only made matters worse. Many locals saw them as unpatriotic, even traitorous.

The 1919 killings were an escalation of years of attacks by the anti-IWW coalition. In 1914, IWW members looking for food were marched out of town. In 1917, they were evicted from their union hall. And in 1918, a group of businessmen raided the hall during a Red Cross parade, beating members and dumping them outside town.

When the shooting ended, six were dead: four Legionnaires, one Wobbly, and a deputy sheriff. The Wobbly, Wesley Everest, was captured, jailed, and later lynched by a vigilante mob. Some IWW members were convicted in the aftermath, but no one was charged in Everest’s killing or for the assault on the union hall.

1947: Centralia, Illinois

The bosses had been warned, but the mine blew up anyway.

On March 25, 1947, an explosion tore through Centralia Mine Number 5. Coal dust ignited, killing 111 miners.

The hazards were known long before. State and federal inspectors, union officials, and safety officers had warned of the coal dust buildup and unsafe blasting practices. Management ignored the warnings. At one point, they even admitted to unsafe practices. Still, nothing changed. The result was a catastrophe.

Whenever you hear about regulation, safety rules, and the economy, you should think back to Centralia, Illinois. This was a time when labor unions wielded more power than today, yet workplace safety rules were ignored enough that killing 111 men barely registered beyond becoming the fifth-worst workplace catastrophe since 1940.

1962: Centralia, Pennsylvania

Rather than destroying 100 miners in an instant, this Centralia has been erased slowly, in smoke and fire.

At least, because authorities could foresee the danger, they eventually stepped in, after allowing the even bigger wrong to happen.

Since 1962, an underground coal seam fire has burned beneath Centralia, Pennsylvania. Most believe it started when a landfill fire spread into abandoned mines. The consequences have been terrifying.

In 1979, a gas station owner discovered his underground fuel tanks had reached 172°F. In 1981, a 12-year-old boy fell into a 150-foot sinkhole in his backyard—saved only by clutching a tree root. Carbon monoxide seeped through the ground.

The fire led to a slow evacuation. In 1983, Congress gave $42 million for relocation. More than 500 buildings were demolished. In 1992, the state seized remaining properties through eminent domain. The town lost its ZIP code in 2002. By 2020, only five residents remained, having won the right to stay for life. Today, Centralia is little more than cracked roads, weeds, and warning signs of fire and poison gas.

Centralias

The center did not hold in Missouri, where border wars became slaughter in the Civil War. It did not hold in Oklahoma, where white supremacy cracked and Black resistance burned. It did not hold in Illinois, where profit outweighed miners’ lives. It did not hold in Pennsylvania, where the earth itself betrayed its settlers, burning from below.

And so it goes: America is a lone Douglas fir in a wind storm, fragile and furious. Stability is never given; it is enforced, at someone else’s expense, until it snaps.

Order, a center, is forced by guerrillas, mobs, bosses, and bureaucrats. All tools of power that maintain control until they go too far, and tragedy ensues.

The Centralias are not exceptions. You could grab more city names out of a bag and find a host of similar sundown town violence, industrial accidents, and labor wars. Centralias are warnings.

Things fall apart. The Centralias cannot hold. And the little anarchies are loosed.

But in the end, most of these Centralias still exist. Missouri is still on the map. Washington and Illinois are scarred by history, but still there. Even the Centralia that was wiped off the face of Pennsylvania was not erased by indifference but met, however imperfectly, with responsibility and relocation. Yeats’ Ireland, torn by violence, moved on, even now edging toward reunification. And Europe, as it leans towards continental war again, has also seen long stretches of peace and reunification. History is not only a blood-dimmed tide. It carries moments of rebuilding, of reconciliation, of quiet endurance. The fire does not burn forever, and the center, however fragile, can be rebuilt.