Centralia, Illinois

City: Centralia

County: Marion

State: Illinois

Lat/Long: 38.5167, -89.1333

Centralia, Illinois is a city resting in Clinton, Jefferson, Marion, and Washington counties, Illinois, with the largest portion in Marion. Located fifty-eight miles east of East St. Louis, Centralia was formed and platted by the Illinois Central Railroad Company in 1853 after the latter received a significant grant from the state of Illinois. As such, it became a railroad town, and the location for division points of both the branch and main line of Illinois Central, later the J. S. & E. purchased by the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy Railroad, then the Southern Railway, then Illinois Southern. Largely settled by German immigrants, Centralia developed a farming industry as well as mining their most abundant natural resource, coal. Centralia was chartered as a city in 1859.

J. H. G. Brinkerhoff, Brinkerhoff's History of Marion County Illinois (Indianapolis: B. F. Bowen, 1909), 141-42; The Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911), 5:680; Webster's New Geographical Dictionary (Springfield, MA: Merriam-Webster, 1988), 236.