Centralia's Forgotten Neighbor: The Ghost Town of Logan

Undated photo of the Logan Breaker near Centralia, taken sometime between 1881 and 1896.

Just about everyone in Pennsylvania knows about the ghost town of Centralia, and most folks who were born and raised in the area, such as myself, have spent many a summer day exploring the post-Apocalyptic terrain, marveling at the smoke billowing from cracks in the abandoned streets, pondering the fire that has been burning underground for generations.

However, very few locals remember Centralia's smaller and lesser-known neighbor-- the village of Logan. Like Centralia, Logan also became a casualty of the infamous mine fire.

Originally constructed in 1881 as a company town for employees of the Logan breaker, which was under the ownership of Lewis A. Riley & Co. (it was sold to the Lehigh Valley Coal Company in 1896), the village consisted of a few dozen wood frame houses and around eight hundred residents during its heyday in the late 19th century. Today, all that remains is a cracked street off the eastbound lane of Route 61, just west of Centralia. Shown on maps as "Logan Road", this street was once the main thoroughfare of a once-thriving village.



The Early Days


The Logan Colliery opened in 1881, with H.J. Kelly as its first foreman. Before long, houses were constructed near the mines, and while details are scarce, these first homes were probably little more than shacks and hovels. Kelly, a Welsh immigrant who had risen up through the ranks with the Philadelphia & Reading Coal & Iron Company, was known for getting the most out of his workers and had built a reputation as a no-nonsense kind of boss. Having worked in the mines of Wales as an eight-year-old boy and proving his mettle on the battlefields of Maryland and Virginia with Company H of the 11th Pennsylvania Cavalry, Kelly was as tough-as-nails and, according to contemporary accounts, notoriously cheap.

Because of his miserly nature, working conditions at Logan were less than ideal. Just months after the opening of the colliery, the workers went on strike. The miners were paid by the car, and earned one dollar for large cars and ninety cents for small cars. They argued that, since small cars and large cars held the same exact quantity of coal, they were being cheated out of their earnings. The miners claimed that the highest paid among them only earned $1.90 a day, which was far less than what other mine operators paid.  Conditions at Logan were also notoriously dangerous. The first fatality occurred just days after operations commenced, when a miner named Wagner was crushed by a wagon. He was the first of many miners to lose his life working under Foreman Kelly. Both cave-ins and wrongful death lawsuits were common occurrences.

Despite the fact that he was himself an immigrant, Kelly was not particularly fond of the European immigrants who slaved in the bowels of the earth for starvation wages. In March of 1882, for instance, he fired every Hungarian and Polish employee at the mine, for fear that they were carriers of smallpox (none of the discharged miners, in fact, were infected with the disease). Yet, no one could find fault with Kelly's results; by 1884 the colliery was shipping an average of 1,080 tons of coal per day. Superintendents and foreman of rival mines flocked to Logan to learn just how this feat was being accomplished.

It would appear that one of the drivers of Kelly's success was a natural love of competition. In the early 1880s, Centralia had cemented its reputation as the most productive mining town in the region, and from the earliest days, there was a deep rivalry between the owners of the Logan breaker, Lewis A. Riley & Co., and the owners of the Centralia breaker, the Lehigh Valley Coal Company. Within a few years, however, it was the Logan operation that had taken top honors in the coal region. An article from the Bloomsburg Columbian from March 28, 1884, stated:

The Logan colliery is shipping as much, if not more, coal than any colliery in the Anthracite region, as the following figures will show. On Tuesday, 351 cars averaging 2 1/2 tons each were shipped. If shipments continue in this manner Centralia, in a few years hence, will be a town that was.

Maybe it was the fact that the miners at Logan were worked to the brink of exhaustion that the village never developed the gritty reputation of other mining patches. By all accounts, life in Logan, for the most part, was quiet and peaceful. Perhaps the miners just didn't have the stamina to go drinking, brawling and carousing after hours.

For the most part, the residents of Logan were a close-knit, friendly, bunch who took pride in their tiny community. The first child born in the village, who happened to be a girl, was named in honor of her birthplace; she was christened Logan Kelley.

Of course, life in a coal patch village was never entirely peaceful, and during the late 19th century the area around Centralia was known for being something of a rough-and-tumble kind of place. Gambling and drunken brawls were par for the course, and it was not uncommon for travelers along the road to Centralia to be ambushed by gangs of highwaymen. In February of 1896, a band of burglars broke into several homes in Logan while most of the miners were at work, making off with their finest clothes. When mass was held the following Sunday at St. Ignatius' Church, the pews were packed with churchgoers in dungarees, denim and work boots.



The Decline of Logan


Although houses remained standing in Logan until just a few decades ago, the decline of the village had already begun nearly a century earlier when the Logan breaker, now under the ownership of the Lehigh Valley Coal Company, burned to the ground on August 8, 1896. At around 3:30 in the morning, the sky was lit up for miles around as the mammoth breaker was enveloped by flames. Thirty minutes later, one of the largest coal breakers in the region had been reduced to smoldering cinders and ash. The blaze had spread so quickly that by the time the call had been received by the Anthracite Fire Company in Mount Carmel, it was already too late to save the Logan breaker; the engines never even left the firehouse.

The superintendent of the breaker, Eli T. Connor, stated that the fire had originated in the engine house, but the ensuing investigation determined that the cause of the fire was a complete mystery. Although several hundred men and boys were rendered jobless overnight, had it not been for the quick thinking of Superintendent Connors, the situation might have been much worse. Immediately after arriving on the scene, Connors ordered employees to cover the mine opening with boards and cover them with several loads of dirt. This action prevented the flames from entering the mines and igniting the veins of anthracite. Nonetheless, losses from the fire were estimated to be around $35,000, which would be the equivalent of around $1.1 million today.

A week after the fire, the Lehigh Valley Coal Company announced that it would not rebuild the breaker until the insurance claim was settled, but would enlarge the neighboring Centralia breaker in the meantime. With its increased capacity, the upgraded breaker was able to process coal extracted from the Centralia mines as well as from the Logan workings.

Even if the Logan breaker had not burned down, coal company officials had been skeptical about Logan's future. "The Logan Workings were pretty well worked out anyhow, and the abandonment of the old breaker was only a question of a short time," stated an anonymous Lehigh Valley Coal Company official to the Mount Carmel Daily News on August 15, 1896. This, and other cryptic remarks, led some to wonder if perhaps the breaker had been torched deliberately as an insurance scam. Just seven months before the fire, the breaker had been purchased by the Lehigh Valley Coal Company from Lewis A. Riley & Co.

Others, however, suspected that the fire might've been set by a disgruntled worker. Conditions under the Lehigh Valley Coal Company were only marginally better than conditions under Lewis A. Riley & Co.  In June of 1896, two months before the inferno, the miners at Logan once again went on strike, this time after Connor cut their wages by ten cents per car.



The Paradise That Never Was


After the closure of the Logan breaker, many locals clung to the hope that their beloved village would experience a rebirth. While many miners had abandoned the village to seek employment at the nearby Continental, Montana and Midvalley collieries, some stayed behind to fill the limited number of positions available shipping coal from the Logan mines to the breaker in Centralia. However, in 1902, when an electric underground rail system was constructed to link the two locations, most of these jobs evaporated. Yet many refused to leave the village, believing that their fortunes were about to change.

The mood in Logan and neighboring Centralia was optimistic in November of 1897, when the Lehigh Valley Rail Company announced that it would be laying several miles of new track in preparation for the opening of the Midvalley No. 2 colliery in present-day Wilburton. An article in the November 13, 1897 edition of the Mount Carmel Item prophesied:

This is an important move as it practically opens up an entire new coal field and will result in the development of a new section of the coal country that, up to the present, has practically been a primeval wilderness... Property at Centralia is being held at its highest market value and the people are jubilant over the fact that prosperity promises to dawn upon their town in the very new future and relieve the period of depression from which the town has suffered for the past sixteen months.
While the development of Wilburton created wealth for many, the residents of Logan found themselves excluded from the latest coal boom. The poor quality of local roads made it virtually impossible for miners to cross the mountain to the newly-opened Midvalley colliery.

As the prospect of prosperity vanished and was replaced with the grim reality of poverty, the village slowly began to fall into ruin. By the 1920s, while the rest of America was roaring, Logan was in the throes of a death spiral. In March and April of 1927, several old houses, now abandoned, were torn down. A row of dilapidated houses in the west end of Logan known as the "Block of Blazes" for its reputation as an eyesore and fire hazard was dismantled by workmen from the Lehigh Valley Coal Company in May.

Though the village was already a veritable ghost town by the early 20th century, the handful of residents who remained in Logan were offered a gleam of hope in the 1930s, when the notoriously poor-quality highway between Mount Carmel and Centralia was finally paved. In February of 1938, sewer lines were installed in Logan, and it appeared that the quality of life for the villagers was set to improve.

Unfortunately, while the lives of Logan residents were greatly improved by the growing popularity and increasing affordability of the automobile and improved highways, the village never regained its former prominence. Much of the coal region was still reeling from the effects of the Great Depression and jobs were scarce. With the onset of the Second World War, young able-bodied men left the mines to fight for their country, leaving the village to the feeble and elderly.

Those who were too young, old, or unfit for military service eked out a meager existence picking up coal left behind by the Lehigh Valley Coal Company and selling it independently. Others became bootleg miners, sinking their own illegal shafts or pillaging the abandoned workings for timber and scrap metal. But the state cracked down on these illegal mining operations in 1947, after an explosion of dynamite stored in a shed by the operator of a bootleg mine left one dead and two others seriously injured. Stanley Wufsis, the man killed by the explosion, was hurled 75 feet into the air by the blast. Another accident at a bootleg mine in Logan claimed the life Vito Bressi that same year, and the previous year another bootleg miner, Henry Cardosa, was killed after slipping on ice and falling 300 feet down a stripping pit.

Over the next few decades, the original inhabitants of Logan-- the men who built a straggling mining operation into a coal region dynamo-- succumbed to the ravages of time. One by one the long-time residents of the village died off, and the younger ones moves away in search of opportunity.

And then, in May of 1962, came the final nail in Logan's coffin-- the Centralia mine fire. 

Believed to be caused by the burning of trash in a landfill by the Centralia volunteer fire company in an ill-advised attempt to "beautify" the town, the mine fire has become synonymous with dark irony. The vein of anthracite smoldering three hundred feet underground will continue to burn for the next 250 years, and, at present, the fire encompasses an eight-mile stretch of land, including the entirety of Logan.

When governor Bob Casey invoked eminent domain in 1992 and condemned all properties in Centralia, the decree also extended to neighboring Logan, which shared the same 17927 zip code. A decade later, the U.S. Postal Service revoked the zip code, officially making Logan a ghost town.





Sources/Further Reading:

Pine Grove Herald, July 30, 1881.
Lebanon Daily News, March 29, 1882.
Mount Carmel Daily News, Feb. 6, 1896.
Shenandoah Evening Herald, June 10, 1896.
Mount Carmel Item, Aug. 8, 1896.
Mount Carmel Daily News, August 15, 1896.
Mount Carmel Item, Nov. 13, 1897.
Mount Carmel Daily News, May 27, 1898.
Mount Carmel Daily News, May 2, 1927.
Pottsville Republican, Dec. 19, 1947.
History of Columbia and Montour Counties, Pennsylvania. J.H. Battle, 1887.