Centralia Pennsylvania
This next set of pictures comes from
an unlikely source. Jeroen Vervloet lives in the
Netherlands. When planning a visit to the U.S., he
learned of Centralia's story and decided to visit the
remains of this small town. While in Centralia he took
these pictures and upon his return, contacted us. Here
are his pictures, and his impressions of of a visit to
Centralia PA.
We planned a visit of almost four weeks to to
the U.S. to go to the Fall Carlisle/Hershey PA car show. I was
checking out the internet for anything interesting around
Carlisle/ York and I came to this fantastic website about
Centralia. This is why we visited Centralia.
First of all you can not believe what you
are seeing when you walk over the hot pavement and smell the
strange smoke that is coming out of the ground the second
thing that catches the eye are the totally empty and
abandoned streets. You can still see where the houses were,
and everything is overgrown by trees bushes etc etc. We only
saw one house left just across the Centralia municipal
building. When you see this it is almost unthinkable
that this once was a town with 1100+ people.
We visited the Pioneer Coal mine in Ashland
PA and what a great way to see, look, feel and smell how
people worked
in the early 1900' s in the coalmines. a highly real
recommended destination.
We learned that the coal vein (that is
burning) goes all the way back to Ashland and it would take
hundreds of years to "burn out". We think Ashland is a
typical American "Old Town" that looks great with only one
main street and all the houses on the sides of the road.
This is a adventure on it's own ..........for us in a very
crowded Holland the parts that I really like about America
is that they always leave everything as it is and build
something new on another place/spot
so that we can still see how it was before!!
Please go and take a look at this great
(what was a town) that is now almost a piece of History that
is "Burning" since 1961 because maybe when the last people
are gone, the government will remove and dig out the whole
town to end the mining fire and although it is very tragic
to look at it's also Very interesting to learn from.
best regards (From Holland), Jeroen Vervloet
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