Web Design in Centralia, IL

Centralia, Illinois

Centralia is in Marion County.

About Centralia, Illinois

Centralia reaches into four counties, Marion, Clinton, Washington and Jefferson, and it ranks as the biggest city in three of them yet serves as county seat for none. The name honors the Illinois Central Railroad, and the town was founded where that line's two original branches converged. Inside the southern city limits sits the 1815 initial point of the Third Principal Meridian, which governs land surveys for about 60 percent of the state, including Chicago. Wendell Bauer's 1924 flag design took first prize in a community contest, with a red stripe for the railroads and gold stars for mining and farming. High school teams are the Orphans and Annies, a name that stuck after an announcer said a boys' basketball squad in mismatched red uniforms looked like orphans.

Landmarks and Places in Centralia

• The downtown Commercial Historic District was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2012. The Centralia Carillon, completed in 1983 with 65 bells, is ranked eighth-largest in the world, its largest bell Great Tom weighing five and a half tons. Foundation Park covers 235 acres with hiking and exercise trails, an ice-skating pond, two stocked fishing ponds, restored prairie, a 36-hole disc-golf course, the Chapel in the Woods, the Hall and Sentinel shelters, an outdoor amphitheatre called The Bowl, the Moose Oven and the Miner's Memorial. Fairview Park holds ball fields, tennis and sand volleyball courts, a skate park, a swimming pool complex and playgrounds, and displays one of only two surviving 2500-class Illinois Central steam locomotives, maintained by the Age of Steam Memorial organisation, alongside a 9415 caboose and a Republic F-105 Thunderchief. The Centralia Recreational Complex runs to 60,000 square feet. Raccoon Lake, a 970-acre reservoir built in 1942, and Lake Centralia, 412 acres built in 1910 with an average depth of ten feet, lie near the city. Kaskaskia College holds the Jim Beasley Veterans Tribute. Illinois Route 161 runs east and west through the city and U.S. Highway 51 north and south.

The Centralia Economy

• Rail and mining shaped the city. The Illinois Central line that named the place is now Canadian National track, and Amtrak still calls: the southbound City of New Orleans, the northbound City of New Orleans, and the Saluki and Illini services that run between Chicago and Carbondale. Production of the PayDay candy bar began in Centralia in 1938, and Michael Moore's 1998 documentary The Big One opens with the closing of that plant in the late twentieth century. The city owns and operates Centralia Municipal Airport, a general aviation field with a 5,001-foot runway, where Airgo, Inc. is the fixed-base operator and the Airgo International Flight School trains pilots. Kaskaskia College, a community college, serves the region from Centralia with extension centers at Vandalia, Salem, Greenville, Trenton and Nashville, and its Harry L. Crisp Technology Center on the east side houses occupational and technical programs. South Central Transit runs public transport. The Centralia Correctional Center, a medium-security state prison for adult males, opened in 1980 with an operating capacity of 1,572.