Semifinalist
Terrain.org 15th Annual Nonfiction Contest
There were once 12 American towns called Centralia. Centralia, North Dakota is now Fargo. Centralia, Wisconsin is now Wisconsin Rapids. Centralia, New York is now Stockton. Centralias remain in Pennsylvania, Illinois, Washington, Missouri, Kansas, Virginia, Iowa, Oklahoma, and Texas. Each had been a central point, typically between railway lines. Now they are the middle of nowhere.
1. Centralia, Pennsylvania
If you live in Philadelphia or New York, you likely know about the Centralia in the Poconos. We know when this Centralia became a ghost town—in 2002, when the U.S. Postal Service erased its zip code. But it is harder to pinpoint the date it became a disaster site. Maybe 1962, when embers burning in an ashcan were tossed on a heap of old sofas, grocery lists, and juice cartons accumulating in the dumpsite above the Centralia coal mine. The embers ignited a fire that slipped down a buried mineshaft, lit up the coal seam, and continues to burn, even today. Or maybe the disaster started on Valentine’s Day in 1981, when 12-year-old Todd Domboski fell down a sinkhole in his grandmother’s backyard, the heat from the fire blistering his dangling feet. Or maybe when, after Todd’s rescue, a newspaper reporter from the Shenandoah Evening Herald snapped his picture, attracting a swell of reporters and photographers.
I sometimes wonder if the disaster actually began with the construction of the Mine Run Railroad in 1854, opening up the region to large-scale harvesting of anthracite coal.
If you road-tripped to Centralia, Pennsylvania during the peak of the pandemic, and if your name is Mackie or Brenda or Nico or Baron von Brunk, then that singular fact of your life in 2021 collided with the singular fact of mine in 2024 when I went to see what remains.
I saw your name spray-painted on the graffiti highway. And if your name is Jeff, I saw your name printed on an unrealistically long shaft of a graffiti penis, ejaculating drips of black paint down the road.
Photo by Jodi Cressman.
What do we hope to find when we visit disaster sites? Researchers in the hospitality industry have found a wide range of motivations: a desire to understand, morbid curiosity, the thrill in being close—but not too close—to danger. Much of this research explicitly aims to help tourist attractions create more “satisfying” experiences for those who come. I felt satisfied with my visits to the sloping memorial in Pearl Harbor and the footprint of the Twin Towers in Manhattan. But what satisfaction lies in an unmarked field?
So many tourists came to see the now empty plot that had once been Centralia, Pennsylvania during the height of the COVID pandemic that the current landowners had enough. They buried most of the main attraction—the highway that had once led from the town to the mine. There is now little to see of the town that was: squares of a sidewalk with horsetail grass erupting through the cracks, a partial wall, gravel ribbons that once laid the foundation for streets, a stop sign, and cars in the yards of houses where a handful of holdouts still live. There is no memorial listing the names of the townspeople or roadside sign offering a brief history of the current emptiness.
The emptiness is the point, and the people living within the COVID disaster came to the site of another disaster, to see that specific kind of nothing.
I came to see it, too, to find the words that would suffice for this nothing happening right in front of me. I am still trying to find them.
2. Centralia, Illinois
If you live in Chicago or St. Louis, then the Centralia you are more likely to know is in southern Illinois. I live in Chicago, but didn’t learn about that particular disaster site until March 2021, when the closest vaccination appointment I could find was at a Walgreens five hours south.
I could not wait. My mother was medically fragile, paralyzed from a stroke, and I was terrified that I would expose her to COVID. I visited every Sunday, prepared with rice pudding and a list of conversation prompts. If I asked, “How are you feeling?” she would turn her face to the wall. So instead, I would ask: “How does your lavender survive the Chicago winter?” Or I would ask: “What was the name of the lawn mower repair shop by Penrose Hospital?” For these questions, she had answers.
On the morning of my appointment, I woke up my teenage son, Dox, and we hit the road early. He had nothing else to do. School was a joke and sports were cancelled. The only disaster on my mind was the one we were in the middle of.
As we drove to Centralia, we passed through Congerville, my mother’s hometown, in the center of vast fields of soybeans. It is difficult to imagine what happens in her center. I am trying.
We had an hour to kill before my appointment, so decided to wait it out at the Centralia Area Historical Society Museum on the corner of Locust and Third, in what had been a grocery warehouse. A weathered woman buzzed us in and pointed to the elevator, suggesting that we start on the third floor and wind our way down.
The theme of the third floor appeared to be “home life.” There is a glass display featuring a “He-On-He Camp Fire Girls Indian Dress,” made in 1924; a cabinet of containers—Mrs. Butterworth’s syrup, Black Silk stove polish, McCormick black pepper, and Ritz crackers; a wooden elephant; a doll’s high chair; a heap of sewing machines; embroidered chair cushions, pinned with a note crediting Christine Hart’s grandmother as the fiber artist; the funeral suit worn by William Kohl, undertaker until 1917; a laundry mangle; paper dolls; and a pink floral kimono, which, on second glance, might actually be a knit cardigan stretched by gravity and time beyond its first form.
The second floor is devoted to school life: yearbooks, desks, gym shorts, road signs celebrating Centralia for having the “winningest basketball team in history.” My son and I linger; we study the team photographs. One photograph, taken in 1941, shows five white boys wearing tank tops and shorts kneeling under the banner of the Centralia Troutmen. In the team photo from 1961, there are still five boys, but only one is white, and now the banner presents them as the Centralia Orphans. There is also a picture of a dog in a sweater standing next to a football. A typed label, affixed with packing tape, tells us that this dog is named Orphan Annie.
“Not a very intimidating mascot,” my son says, as we head down the stairs to the first floor. We make up a skit about a visiting cheerleading team beating their fists in the air and shouting, “Beat the Orphans! Beat the Orphans!” We stop to laugh on the stair landing, killing time.
Violence often arrives in spectacular forms, like explosions, demanding and saturating attention. Stunned in front of our laptops, we watch the coroner’s staff load freezer trucks with body bags in the spring of 2020. We witnessed an angry mob storming the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
But there are also slow forms of violence, like incremental accretion or decay. As the eco-theorist Rob Nixon explains, slow violence happens largely out of sight. It moves so sluggishly that it falls from view, like the continued spread of COVID or the rusting of democracy or the fires smoldering in underground mines. To see slow violence, we have to unfocus our eyes. We have to look beyond the center and take in the blur of movement in a field.
Slow violence is not structural violence, which can be represented by a diagram showing the relations among still parts. Slow violence vibrates, unfolding imperceptibly across time through its delayed effects. Think of television static: energy that never concentrates into event. We need a different kind of witnessing for what Nixon calls the long dying that is slow violence.
Seeing is not enough, Nixon says. We must apprehend.
Photo courtesy Centralia Historical Society.
Dox and I came to a small room on the first floor of the Centralia Area Historical Society Museum, where we found dented lunchboxes, carbide lights, a mine phone, and a clock permanently stopped at 3:26 p.m., the exact time that Centralia Coal Mine No. 5 exploded, and the Troutmen became Orphans. Two poster boards, crafted by local high school students some time ago judging by the yellowing of the glue, tell the story in small fragments of text pasted over blocks of construction paper.
Driscoll Scanlan, mine inspector, composed multiple reports about the dangerous coal dust accumulating in the mine and sent them to the mine director, the Illinois state director of mines and minerals, and the governor. The reports were stamped “Received.”
The miners also wrote to the governor, sending a “plea to you to please save our lives, to please make the department of mines and minerals enforce the laws… before we have a dust explosion.” That letter, too, is marked “Received.”
Inspector Scanlan drank Coke after Coke in Otis Miller’s saloon, waiting for the crowd to thin out enough to give him the chance to speak directly to the director of mines and minerals. When his chance came, he told the director that if the mine dust ignited, it would kill every man in the mine. The director replied, “We will just have to take that chance.”
On the morning of on March 25, 1947, the day the mine exploded, yet another form letter urging that “recommendations of previous inspections, that have not been complied with should be complied with” was drafted and sent. It was marked “Received.”
After the explosion, H.F. McDonald, president of the Centralia Coal Company, told a reporter, “Hell, I don’t know anything about a coal mine.”
The company would be fined a total of $1,000, less than $10 per miner’s life.
I have been travelling to the various Centralias, training my eyes to see slow violence as it unfolds. But first I went to Paris. I saw the retrospective of Mark Rothko’s abstract, dark field paintings. Rothko, whose family fled Russian pogroms, dismissed the critics who described his paintings as serene. Where they see peace, he sees an assault: “I have imprisoned the most utter violence in every inch of their surface.” On the surface, multiple centers require the viewer to look always elsewhere. Instead of a concentration of energy, there is a diffusion, a fight to make the unrecognizable present. If you stand in front of a single Rothko painting for a very long time, you can dimly apprehend this fight.
But if you move to the center of an entire gallery of Rothkos and slowly spin, your eyes take in an exponential multiplication of centers and the struggle swells into full recognition.
The student history posters in the Centralia, Illinois museum tell us that 14 of the men survived the initial blast and crawled into an inner chamber of the mine, hoping their lungs would hold out until rescue. In fact, more miners would be asphyxiated by the choke damp (bad air) than by the explosion.
One miner etched a note on the coal chamber ceiling: Look in everybody’s pockets. We all have notes. Give them to our wives.
The notes:
D.T. take care of Elva and Dickie. Ned.
To my wife: it looks like the end for me. I love you, honey, more than life itself.
Please pray for me and join the church for me. Tell dad to quit the mine and take care of mom.
I am fine at 5:30 p.m. It looks better, getting some air.
Be shure and don’t sign any paper
Name baby Joe so you will have a Joe
Earlier this summer, I returned to Centralia, Illinois, to apprehend what I had not seen the first time. In the time between, there were discrete events: my mother died, Dox left for college, and I received my fifth COVID vaccination.
I returned to the museum where nothing had changed. After, I walked past shuttered stores to the outskirts of town, passing by gas stations and oil derricks thrusting away in what had once been parking lots. I walked by the Farm Fresh gas station. The sign says, “Buy American.” It says “Milk.” It says “VAPE.”
One thing I had missed: there are two notes taped to the side of a cabinet in the mine disaster room of the Centralia Area Historical Museum Society. One quotes Faulkner: “The past is not dead. It is not even past.” The other says: “Don’t just stand there. EXTRAPOLATE.”
I am trying.
So that we can recognize slow violence, and act on it, Nixon asks us to find narrative structures capable of revealing incremental degradation. Tsunamis, wildfires, and explosions demand attention, but it’s difficult to tell a captivating story about the creep of toxic buildup or the gradual extinctions of species. How do you order non-events in a field with many centers?
If you order the Centralias by dates of founding, then Illinois is first, named by the Illinois Central Railroad in 1853. Centralia, Pennsylvania, became itself in 1866. It was originally Centerville, but there was already a Centerville. Centralia, Washington, was also originally a Centerville, named and founded by George Washington, son of a slave. It became one of the Centralias in 1883 on the suggestion of a settler from Centralia, Illinois.
3. Centralia, Washington
The massacre took place when the town was already Centralia. If the center of gravity within a story about a massacre is the measure of victims on each side, then you would say that on the first national celebration of Armistice Day, November 11, 1919, a large number of unionized lumber workers (the Wobblies) opened fire on American veterans marching in the parade, resulting in the deaths of four veterans and one Wobbly. You might even add the name of John Haney, Centralia deputy sheriff, to the list of victims, as he was killed accidentally by somebody else while they were both pursuing the Wobblies.
But if you look to the dust rather than the blast, you would find another story: of men in Washington sawing logs six days a week to fuel the war effort, sleeping in overcrowded and unventilated bunkhouses, without insurance to cover their injuries, which were both common and serious. Tree branches are called widowmakers for a reason. You would say that the Wobblies sought to organize all the working classes: the miners, the textile workers, and the loggers, and their comprehensive understanding of labor oppression is what made them particularly reviled among the owning class.
Nearly every Wobbly effort to organize in the Pacific Northwest was met with raids, mass arrests, and firehoses. In Centralia, Washington, a mob broke into the newsstand of a sympathetic blind man, burned his papers, tied an American flag around the newsstand door, and tacked on a note: “You leave town in 24 hours.” He did. A month before the massacre, men with corporate interests posted an ad in the local paper: “Wobblies—How to get rid of them and stay rid is the question before the meeting of all employers of Centralia.”
The one Wobbly victim of the massacre was Wesley Everest, who was chased by armed Legionnaires after he ran from the union hall. He fired behind him, killing a pursuer. A mob led Everest by a belt around his neck to the second city jail, where he was castrated, then kidnapped and lynched. The only man willing to do it, a man ironically named Lynch, transported Everest’s body to the cemetery.
I have not been to this Centralia. But I did go to the digital archives of the University of Washington library, where I found a picture of this man in front of his moving van. Painted on the side: “Lynch, for quick work, call us.”
When I go, I will walk to the city hall built over the plot of the second city jail. I will walk down Railroad Avenue. I will run my finger over the woodwork in the train depot, wondering if it came from a widowmaker. I will want to know the widow’s name.
We often say that trauma cannot be fully captured within language, but I can easily describe the detonations that set off my mother’s long dying. In fact, for months, I could not stop talking about the facts of her cataclysmic stroke: how she had been picking lettuce in the garden, how some inexplicable sensation of wrongness woke my father from his nap and prompted him to search for her throughout the house, how she was rushed to the hospital where she fell under the expert, extensive, and tremendously expensive care of a medical team that released her four months later, as there was nothing more they could do to improve her lot or ease her suffering, and we should not expect insurance to cover any physical therapies or home support because of her evident “failure to progress,” and statistically speaking, we could expect that she would live for one year.
And when another explosion ended her life—this time, an explosive infection—I would retell the story for months to any friend or relative or stranger who happened to ask why I was weeping while, say, holding a can of chickpeas in a grocery store. I would explain that she had coded on the operating table almost immediately after they sliced open her abdomen, that her records were confused with another patient’s and her DNR was not honored, so she was taped together and intubated. That I sang “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” into her unhearing ears, and my aunt Gloria sang “In the Sweet By and By,” and my aunt Rebecca sang “You Are My Sunshine,” and how after we had removed the ventilator and she exhaled her last slow breath, her body was taken to a medical school, then returned to the hospital. The medical school said that there was nothing teachable in her remains.
But in the vastness between these two explosions, when her body’s dust was incrementally accruing in her caverns, I struggled to find words for how “things were going,” whenever anybody asked. How can you describe a continuous and, so, uneventful unfolding of pain and confusion?
What is there to tell of the slow erosion of my mother’s body and mind as she lay paralyzed in a hospital bed in a tiny room off the kitchen, not for one year as predicted, but for a decade?
Photo courtesy Wikipedia.
4. Centralia, Missouri
If you are a Civil War history buff, you may know about Centralia, Missouri because of the massacre in 1864. A band of Confederate guerillas led by Bloody Bill Anderson opened fire into a train arriving at the Centralia station. They boarded the train and lined up 21 unarmed Union soldiers, heading home to Iowa on furlough, and shot them. They lay the body of Richard Williams across the train track and ordered the engineer to run over it, derailing the train, which they soon set on fire. This is the smaller atrocity of the day.
That afternoon, Major Johnston of the Union army led 130 of his men to investigate the column of smoke rising from the burning train and fell into a Bloody Bill Anderson’s ambush in a nearby farmer’s cornfield, killing the major and all but four of his men. Anderson understood the power of the violent spectacle. He urged his troops to scalp and mutilate the fallen soldiers, starting with Major Johnston. An official statement from Union General Clinton B. Fisk reported that most were “shot through the head, then scalped, bayonets thrust through them, their ears and noses cut off and thrust into their mouths.” Lieutenant W. W. Carpenter found his brother’s body among the dead. His clothes had been burned off and his little finger amputated, making it easier to slide off the golden ring gifted by his girl back home. The body of one soldier had a note pinned to it: Clements skelpt you.
A local historian, Phil Stewart, tried to find the words for this horror. “Some of those guys would cut off ears of the guys that they had killed and would make necklaces out of them. Wearing human body parts around their neck, life just becomes less significant.” These words must satisfy our hunger to name an insignificance of life.
Centrale, noun, plural centralia: the eight central bones of the carpus. We can’t see them with the naked eye, but feel them move with each turn of the wrist.
The spectacle of violence is so arresting in the story of the Centralia, Missouri massacre that I first wondered if it had no slow form. I had to see for myself. When I visited the grass field by Young’s Creek, where the massacre took place, I did not find shrapnel or other relics of war. I came in early March, and the grass in the vast meadow was long and yellow, lined by towers of bare trees. A dog barked.
I directed my gaze to two markers in the shape of the tombstones. The older marker was erected in 2005 by the Sons of Confederate Veterans. It notes that the guerrilla forces lost three men during the battle and that, later on, Bloody Bill Anderson would be murdered in an ambush led by the Union. A second marker was put up four years later by the Daughters of Union Veterans, ten feet behind the first. Two markers, both sides, as neutral as a yellow field of grass in a Missouri spring. A slow violence was coming into view.
When I slackened my sight even further, I could see this slow violence in the home movies chirring through the projector in the basement of my childhood home. My brother is seven, in boots and hat, pretending to be Jesse James, a member of that same band of Confederate guerillas. Blam blam, he shouts, pointing his finger guns.
In math, a field is something that has two operations: addition and multiplication. A plane goes on forever, infinitely, but a field is a countable set that we can take in all at once, suspending each variable next to another.
Literary plots push forward to an end that was already in sight from the beginning. But mathematical scatterplots suspend distinct points, revealing correlations. Scatterplots can tell the story of a field: a flat line between the events on a historian’s timeline, the blank of a bed between the head and footboards, the horizon between peaks of the heart monitor, widening with your mother’s every last breath.
Photo by Jodi Cressman.
5 – 12. The Others
Centralia, Kansas has two beginnings. Some say it was settled by colonists from Maine and Illinois in 1859, and the town was at the center of the colony. Others say it was named after the Seneca, who moved from New York to Kansas. We do not know for sure the significance of its name.
Centralia, Iowa, 1850, area of .58 miles, was first Dacotah, but since it was not the first Dacotah, it had to become Centralia. In this time of becoming Centralia, it had no houses, but it did have a hotel and a schoolhouse, which “has long since gone the way of perishable matter,” according to the History of Dubuque County. That history laments that the town “failed to improve as was anticipated.” In 1880, the town had no more than 100 people, two stores, two hotels, a blacksmith and wagon shop. In 2024, it has 116 people, a Town Clock pizza restaurant, S&S pet cremation service, and S&S sign shop.
I cannot find historical records about disasters in these other Centralias. I know that Kansas was a sundown town and that there was a church burned to the ground in Virginia. So, it may be more true to say that the violence is there, on the surface, but not yet fully in view.
When I go, I will etch my mother’s name with a stick in a dusty field, as I did in Centralia, Illinois and Centralia, Missouri and Centralia, Pennsylvania. She was here, the words will say, on this earth.
By day, Jodi Cressman teaches literature and writing at Dominican University, just outside of Chicago. By night, she works on a book-length hybrid memoir about disaster and slow violence in her life and in towns named Centralia. She wants to credit John Bartlow Martin’s 1948 Harper’s article, “The blast in Centralia no. 5,” for much of what she learned about the mining disaster in Centralia, Illinois.You can read more of her creative writing in Compressed: A Journal of Creative Arts.
Header photo of graffiti on road in Centralia, Pennsylvania by Yugtha Jungbadoor, courtesy Shutterstock.
