When Hugh Lord awoke the morning of June 11th, he found that Lake Mead had reached his front door. It was time – but not before setting his own home ablaze and watching it burn to the ground. He waded up to the rowboat bobbing in the waves of his front yard and paddled away.
The garage owner was St. Thomas’s final resident, but not the last person to see the small Nevada town. The post office closed up shop on Lord’s last day. Postmaster Leland Whitmore is said to have canceled 4,000 letters, before hurling his stamp canceler into the rising waters. Workmen quickly demolish the building. Seventy-three years after its founding by Mormon missionaries, St. Thomas disappeared under the waves.
Its founders, too, abandoned the town a few years after arriving. They split for Utah after refusing to pay Nevada State tax – a radically different motivator than Lord and his contemporaries. The federal government paid the last residents to vacate the town and surrounding areas following Hoover Dam’s construction. At the turn of the following century, lowering waters revealed the skeletal buildings that withstood the flood.
Buford was founded the year after St. Thomas. The Wyoming town began life as a military outpost as the United States’ first transcontinental railroad was being built in the years leading up to the Civil War. The population declined rapidly, as the fort moved to neighboring Laramie. Interstate 80 was constructed along the same site in the middle of the following century.
But the town’s population had already peaked at 2,000 several decades prior. The end of the 20th century saw extreme decline. Don Sammons, his wife and son became Buford’s eighth, ninth and tenth residents when they moved to town from Newport Beach, California in 1980. They were seeking something quieter, and they undoubtedly found it. Fifteen years later, he took over the post office, as the town’s population continued to dwindle.
Sammons operated the Buford Trading Post, a gas station and shop just off the freeway. “They stop because they're intrigued to find this place in the middle of nowhere near the top of a mountain,” he told a reporter. “We sell all kinds of souvenirs from hats to mugs. The post card is our best seller.” He purchased the town outright in 1990.
A year later, his wife died. It would be another 13 years before his son moved away. A “Pop. 1” sign continues to grace the outskirts of Wyoming’s second oldest city. Within a few years, however, Sammons – Buford’s last remaining citizen – followed suit, moving to Colorado to be closer to his son.
"Don, 'The Mayor', is retiring after 20 wonderful years in his town," Sammons announced on the Trading Post’s website. “This entire income producing town is for sale; the house, the Trading Post, the former school house, along with all the history of this very unique place." The auction began at $100,000. A pair of Vietnamese businessmen purchased Buford for 9x that.
Centralia’s founding dates back to the mid-18th century. It would be another 100 years before the town saw a population boom, following the discovery of massive coal deposits, peaking in the 1890s at more than 2,700. Further growth was hampered by global events. The first World War saw the closure of several mines as young, able-bodied men enlisted. The Great Depression caused even more to shut down, leading to a rise in bootleg mining.
It's not clear what sparked the fire, but most believed it was set intentionally. A few years prior, Pennsylvania passed a law designed to regulate the use of strip-mining sites as landfills, over fears that the conditions could lead to fire. A worker may have set trash ablaze in an effort to clear out the landfill, only to ignite a fire that continues to burn over half a century later. It was a perfect storm. Efforts to douse the visible flames were made in vain. The fire spread through labyrinthian underground tunnel, fueled by oxygen from holes in the surface, while landfill trash restricted the injection of inflammable material. Carbon monoxide billowed out of fissures in the ground.
"It continues to burn because it's too large to extinguish or stop,” Penn State professor Stephen Couch explained. "There's plenty of coal left to burn. Stopping air from getting to the fire is impossible; there are too many holes, many of them bootleg holes that are not on any map. Digging the fire out is prohibitively expensive, as is trenching it to stop its advance. The fire will eventually stop on its own because it will burn to rock barriers or to the water table."
On Valentine’s Day 1981, a group of political officials visited Centralia to survey the damage. Todd Domboski ventured out of his home to find out what was happening – but first, a slight detour to examine a spot where smoke was emerging from the grass. The ground gave out beneath him, as the 12-year-old collapsed into a pit full of hot, toxic mud. The more he struggled, the deeper his sank, until his head was fully submerged. A hand reached out and pulled Domboski from the smoldering muck. It was his teenage cousin, Eric Wolfgang, who had witnessed the whole ordeal.
The visiting politicians were Pennsylvania Governor Dick Thornburgh and U.S. Rep James Nelligan. Two years later, Congress authorized $42 million to relocate the citizens of Centralia and neighboring Byrnesville. Most citizens agreed to the buyout. Early the following decade, Thornburgh’s successor, Bob Casey, declared eminent domain, condemning the area’s buildings. A decade later, the Post Office revoked Centralia’s zip code. But not everyone had left. Reports vary about how many residents remain, from “fewer than five” to “fewer than 10.”
“People have called it a ghost town, but I look at it as a town that’s now full of trees instead of people,” resident John Comarnisky told Reuters in 2008. “And truth is, I’d rather have trees than people." Experts believe the Centralia fire could continue to burn for another 250 years.
Monowi was never a boomtown. It peaked at 123 people in the 1930 census. In the decades since, the Nebraska town has experienced population decline in all but two decades. From 1970 to 1980, it jumped 12.5%, from 16 people to 18, and from 2010 to 2020, it increased a staggering 100% when the figure went from one to two. Elsie Eiler, the bar owner who became the only citizen and de facto mayor when her husband died in 2004, contends that she remains the only person in town.
A spokeswoman for the census confirmed her suspicions. “What you’re seeing there is the noise we add to the data so you can’t figure out who is living there,” she explained. “It protects the privacy of the respondent and the confidentiality of the data they provide.”
At 89, the Nebraska town’s final resident still runs the bar, which is frequented by patrons from the surrounding area. “Like Monowi, I’m too tough to die,” Eiler said in an interview last year. “This is my home. All my friends are around. Why would I want to leave?”
Sources:
St. Thomas residents knew progress doomed their town https://www.reviewjournal.com/news/st-thomas-residents-knew-progress-doomed-their-town/
This ghost town is too dangerous for humans because an endless fire burns beneath it https://www.salon.com/2023/03/04/this-ghost-town-is-too-for-humans-because-an-endless-beneath-it/
Packing Up, Moving On and Selling the Town https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/08/us/ready-to-move-on-man-auctions-his-town.html
Final Centralia, Pa., residents can live out lives in town atop burning mine https://www.lehighvalleylive.com/breaking-news/2013/10/final_centralia_pa_residents_c.html
A One-Woman Town, Documented for Over 17 Years https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/26/insider/one-woman-town-monowi-nebraska.html