Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Plunges into Pennsylvania (32 page)

 

 

So maybe he wasn't the greatest U.S. president. But he was the only one from Pennsylvania
.

J
ames Buchanan, who served as the 15th president of the United States from 1857 to 1861, had the misfortune of presiding over the dissolution of the country as it careened into civil war. As a result, history has not judged him kindly—he's generally ranked in the bottom tier of presidents, and some consider him
the
worst president. But that doesn't mean he's not interesting.

Buchanan was born on April 23, 1791, in Franklin County, near in a place called Cove Gap. Buchanan attended Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where he was once expelled for “bad behavior” (he often disrupted class). He begged to be read-mitted, promised his teachers he'd shape up, and ultimately graduated with honors in 1809.

Although he was most famous as president, Buchanan served in a number of other positions on his way up the political ladder. He was elected a state representative in 1814 and, beginning in 1821, served five terms as a U.S. representative. He also was Andrew Jackson's minister to Russia and the Secretary of State during James Polk's administration. (Polk wanted to nominate him to the
Supreme Court, but Buchanan refused.) Franklin Pierce appointed him as minister to Great Britain in 1853.

Buchanan had hoped to be nominated for president in 1844 and again in the next two elections, but the Democratic Party passed him over each time. His nomination for president finally came in 1856 after delegates went through 17 rounds of nominations before agreeing on him. One of Buchanan's major selling points was that, because he'd been out of the country as the minister to Great Britain, he wasn't tainted by America's major controversy of the time: slavery. Still, as much as he wanted to be president, he was reluctant to accept the 1856 nomination, writing, “Before many years, the abolitionists will bring war upon this land. It may come during the next presidential term.” Despite that concern, he took the nomination and won the presidency.

Buchanan was known as a “doughface”—a term that meant a man from the North who was sympathetic to the South—and in fact, he blamed most of the nation's troubles with slavery on Northern abolitionists causing trouble. At the start of his administration, Buchanan learned that the Supreme Court was about to hand down a proslavery verdict in the case of Dred Scott, a slave who sued to have the court free him. Instead, the court (led by Justice Robert Taney) sided with Scott's owner and declared that because Scott was black and thus not a U.S. citizen (neither freed blacks nor slaves were allowed citizenship at the time), he couldn't sue anyway.

Buchanan hoped the Dred Scott decision would settle the slavery issue . . . but of course, it didn't. Instead, it ignited even further
controversy (most notably, whether Kansas should be admitted to the Union as a free or a slave state) and threw Buchanan into a battle with his own party. This split the Democratic Party by the election of 1860, when two Democrats ran for president: Buchanan had bowed out, and the two who remained were Stephen Douglas from the North and John C. Breckenridge from the South. The party's split all but assured victory for the Republican candidate, Abraham Lincoln.

By the end of Buchanan's term, it was clear that a number of Southern states were planning to secede, and as president, he needed to do something. So, on December 3, 1860, he announced to Congress that even though it was his opinion that states could not legally secede from the Union, the federal government couldn't stop them, either.

Less than three weeks later, South Carolina withdrew from the Union, and by February 1861—a month before Buchanan's term ended—six more states had withdrawn and formed the Confederate States of America. The first shots of the Civil War, at South Carolina's Fort Sumter, were fired on Buchanan's watch on January 9, 1861.

How important was Buchanan's choice not to take action? In 2006, a group of historians assembled by the University of Louisville called his refusal to do more to halt the dissolution of the Union as the single biggest presidential blunder in history.

Buchanan, who had accepted the presidency with reservations, seemed delighted to pass it on to Lincoln in March 1861, telling
the 16th president, “If you are as happy in entering the White House as I shall feel [leaving it], you are a happy man.” By that time, Buchanan was already so unpopular that the Senate drafted a resolution condemning him. His presidential portrait was removed from the Capitol rotunda for fear it might be vandalized.

Aside from being regarded one of the worst presidents in history, Buchanan is notable for another reason: he's the only U.S. president who never married. Buchanan had been engaged in his late 20s to Anne C. Coleman, a daughter of a wealthy Philadelphia family, but the engagement was broken off (historians still argue by whom). Coleman died soon after, and even though it was never proven, many people speculated she committed suicide. During his presidency, Buchanan's “first lady” was his niece Harriet Lane.

 

What's unusual about the eastern Pennsylvania town of Centralia? Nothing . . . except that it has been on fire since 1962
.

C
entralia sits atop one of the United States' largest veins of anthracite coal, a rare and valuable fuel source with an especially high carbon content. At the turn of the 20th century, Centralia was a booming mining town, and in 1981, more than 1,000 people still lived there. But by 2007, only nine residents remained.

Today, most of the town has been razed. Driveways turn off empty streets into grass lots, and the few houses still standing are propped up by stone or wooden supports. In 1992, the State of Pennsylvania took control of the town, and the post office revoked Centralia's ZIP code in 2002. What turned Centralia into a ghost town? A fire that has burned for almost half a century.

Centralia was originally called Bull's Head, named for a tavern of the same name that opened in 1841 and was the town's first business. By 1860, the name had been changed—first to Cen-treville and then Centralia—and coal had been discovered there. People looking to make their fortunes poured into the area, but the wealth of the coal mines came at a price: one man died for every 35,164 tons of coal mined, a fatality rate three times higher than that of most other mining areas.

Crime was also a problem. Arson and murder were common. And the Molly Maguires, a secret group of organized criminals,
even murdered the town's founder in 1868. But despite its rough reputation, Centralia was a booming mining town at the turn of the 20th century.

Over the next 50 years, though, as underground mining became less profitable, strip miners bought up Centralia's mineral rights. This inexpensive—but ecologically devastating—method scraped coal from the surface, leaving behind deep gashes in the earth. Over the years, the coal deposits were further depleted, and the strip miners also moved away. Between 1950 and 1960, the number of miners in Centralia dropped by 93 percent.

In May 1962, one of the abandoned strip mines was being used as the town dump, and just before Memorial Day, the dump caught fire. This was not big news—former mining towns often used old mining pits as dumps, and fires were common. Dump fires sometimes ignited (and were quickly extinguished) as often as once a week. Some smoldered longer, but were generally considered just a part of the landscape in the coal region. One mine fire in Laurel Run, Pennsylvania, has been burning since 1915.

But Centralia's fire was different—it burned through the clay layers added to the dump as fire retardants and ignited the coal below. Once the coal seam ignited, the blaze had plenty of fuel and oxygen to keep burning. The only way to put the fire out was to dig up the seam completely and quickly, but two months went by before Centralia officials asked the state for help in putting out the fire. By then, the cost was $30,000, and government funding, hampered by a Congress-imposed spending cap on mine reclamation projects, just wasn't there. The townspeople finally got some of the money three months after the fire began, and they started excavating.

Digging actually caused more trouble when the newly opened trench exposed the coal seam's surfaces to the air, allowing in more oxygen to fuel the fire. Two months after the digging began, the blaze swept past the trench and progressed along two fronts of the underground coal seam, burrowing slowly toward downtown Centralia. Plumes of steam rose through cracks in the ground.

By 1969, the fire was still burning, and the cost of digging it out had jumped to $4.5 million. Looking for a cheaper solution, officials decided to inject the old mine shaft with ash, hoping to smother the blaze. It was a good idea, but they ran out of money before completing the project. In 1978, the federal government proposed digging a $500,000 trench to stop the fire. It would have to go through the center of town, though, and would destroy two populated streets. Residents vetoed the idea.

As everyone debated, the estimated cost kept rising. When it reached $9 million, government officials started to question whether spending any more money in Centralia was wise—the total value of the town's property was only about $500,000. The cost of saving the town was more than it was worth.

The townspeople had started to feel the fire's effects too. A mine fire burning underground can reach 600°F to 1,500°F. And as it burns, it consumes oxygen and leaves behind deadly gases, including both carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide. The dangerous combination of gases, which miners call “black damp,” started seeping into Centralia homes. One resident noticed that his furnace's pilot light kept going out because
of the black damp flowing into his basement from the fire. Other residents were short of breath, and government-installed carbon monoxide monitors found elevated levels of the gas inside homes. Then, in 1978, a thermal probe 12 feet from a local gas station registered a temperature of 136 degrees; the ground 20 feet from a natural gas pipeline was measured at 770 degrees. Both were potentially disastrous situations, and fissures opened on nearby Route 61, eventually forcing the state to abandon the road.