Centralia’s ‘Graffiti Highway’ is finally getting erased

• Charles Thompson/PennLive
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  Thompson has covered state government for The Patriot since 1999. Prior to that, he had covered various Cumberland County municipalities and school districts. Thompson lives in Carlisle with his wife, Beth, and their two children.

The “Graffiti Highway,” that informal landmark / ATV trail / hangout that has been one of Centralia’s calling cards for the last generation, is getting erased from the map of Pennsylvania curiosities.

Pagnotti Enterprises, the Luzerne County-based company that took title to the land several years ago, moved in with a bunch of dump trucks and graders Monday to cover over the abandoned stretch of Route 61 with dirt and other fill that nearby residents hope will turning a nuisance into a nothing.

The project, the first phase of which is expected to take three days, was first reported Monday by The Daily Item of Sunbury.

It earned the full endorsement of Tom Hynoski, Centralia’s borough secretary, in a telephone interview with PennLive later in the day.

“I mean we are overrun with the ATVs on the weekend,” Hynoski said of the crowds that regularly gather for off-road trail-riding adventures, or to make their mark on the road,, or both. “And the last month here, with all of the people out of work because of the coronavirus, it got totally out of control. Everybody’s been requesting that something get done.”

There were some mourners, too.

On the “Centralia Graffiti HIghway” Facebook page, which boasted 676 members as of Monday evening, sentiment ran more on the side of mourning what some saw as a cool memorial to the memory of Centralia, the Columbia County community that was effectively turned into a ghost town by an underground mine fire that started in 1962.

“There is a reason this group was created,” wrote a poster identified as Jason Boyle. “The road was a piece of history and it was also something to do for us locals.”

“This is so disappointing to see,” agreed another poster, identified as David Steward. “It’s one of the few places I wanted to bring my daughter back to when I get back home for a visit as she barely remembers it.”

Many, like Hynoski, blamed the problems on out-of-towners who came to use the area as their personal campground, and then at times pulled additional stunts like partying in a nearby cemetery and defacing graves there, running their ATVs through the remaining residents’ properties and even, on at least one occasion, breaking into their homes out of the belief that they were abandoned.

The borough itself counts eight residents at this point, Hynoski said, scattered among five households.

The Graffiti Highway, most of it actually lies in Conyngham Township, was closed to traffic in 1993. PennDOT, after determining that the ground would never again be used for a highway, relinquished its right-of-way in 2018 allowing ownership to revert to adjacent property owners, the largest of which is a Pagnotti subsidiary known as Pitreal Coal.

The strip of asphalt got its latter-day name because of messages and art that have been placed on the surface since its closure.

Pennsylvania State Police Corporal Tyler Waters said Monday the stretch was a nuisance for his colleagues, in part because visitors would routinely tear down the posted “No Trespassing” signs. That made it impossible for the police to enforce that baseline violation for long periods of time.

Troopers were posted at the site Monday mostly as a precaution, Waters said, to prevent ATV riders from getting into an accident when they suddenly come upon heavy equipment that involved in the fill operation.

PennLive’s effort to reach Pagnotti’s offices Monday were not successful.

Bobby Hughes, an officer of the Eastern Pennsylvania Coalition for Abandoned Mine Reclamation which is spearheading a movement to plant trees across the old town, said he believes the landfill operation will be beneficial for the area, which he said his volunteers crews have spent recent years picking up countless spray paint cans, tires and other trash.

“People seemed to feel a sense of entitlement to that area,” Hughes said Monday, “but there are better ways to commemorate Centralia’s history.”

Centralia background

The underground fire that pushed Centralia into Pennsylvania lore started when a group of paid fireman, on May 27, 1962, started a fire to clean up the town dump before Memorial Day. Firefighters thought they had extinguished the blaze but it spread through an opening in the pit to abandoned coal mines under the town.

That act led to the demise of Centralia, once a bustling coal mining town which had, according author David DeKok, who wrote a book about the fire and its aftermath, about 1,400 residents at the time.

As the result of a study on how best to address the underground fire, more than 1,000 Centralia residents were moved out in the late 1980s in a $42 million federal relocation program.

With the population down to about 50, then-Gov. Robert Casey in 1992 authorized condemnation proceedings through the Columbia County Redevelopment Authority. The U.S. Postal Service in 2002 discontinued Centralia’s 17927 zip code and then-Gov. Ed Rendell in 2009 began the formal eviction of the few remaining residents.

Attempts to stop condemnation proceedings ended in 2013 with a settlement of a federal lawsuit. It resulted in the state paying the seven remaining residents $349,500 for their properties with the stipulation they could remain in their homes until they die.

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