Centralia () is a city in Lewis County, Washington, United States. It is located along Interstate 5 near the midpoint along with Seattle and Portland, Oregon. The city had a population of 16,336 at the 2010 census. Centralia is twinned taking into consideration Chehalis, located to the south close the confluence of the Chehalis and Newaukum rivers.

In the 1850s and 1860s, Centralia’s Borst Home, at the confluence of the Chehalis and Skookumchuck Rivers, was the site of a toll ferry, and the halfway stopping dwindling for stagecoaches keen between Kalama, Washington and Tacoma. In 1850, J. G. Cochran and his wife Anna were led there via the Oregon Trail by their adopted son, George Washington, a free African-American. The associates feared Washington would be provoked into slavery if they stayed in Missouri after the pathway of the Compromise of 1850. Cochran filed a donation land affirmation near the Borst Home in 1852 and was skillful to sell his allegation to Washington for $6,000 because unlike the neighboring Oregon Territory, there was no restriction next to passing valid ownership of land to African Americans in the newly formed Washington Territory.^{[citation needed]}

Upon hearing of the imminent dawn of the Northern Pacific Railway (NP) in 1872, Washington and his wife, Mary Jane, filed a plat for the town of Centerville, naming the streets after biblical references and offering lots for $10 each, with one lot forgive to buyers who built houses. Washington furthermore donated estate for a city park, a cemetery, and a Baptist church. Responding to additional settlers’ concern just about a town in Klickitat County in the melody of the thesame name, the town was renamed Centralia by 1883, as suggested by a recent settler from Centralia, Illinois, and officially incorporated upon February 3, 1886. The town’s population boomed, then collapsed in the Panic of 1893, when the NP went bankrupt; entire city blocks were offered for as little as $50 taking into account no takers. Washington (despite facing racial prejudice from some newcomers) made personal loans and forgave debt to save the town afloat until the economy stabilized; the city later boomed another time based on the coal, lumber and dairying industries. When Washington died in 1905, all businesses in the town closed, and 5,000 mourners attended his funeral.^{[citation needed]}

The boom lasted until November 11, 1919, when the infamous Centralia Massacre occurred. Spurred on by local lumber barons, American Legionnaires (many of whom had returned from WWI to locate their jobs filled by pro-union members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW)), used the Armistice Day parade to anger the IWW hall. Marching unarmed, the Legionnaires broke from the parade and stormed the hall in an effort to bust grip organizing efforts by what was seen to be a Bolshevik-inspired labor movement. IWW workers including recently returned WWI veteran Wesley Everest, stood their ground, engaged and killed four Legionnaires. Everest was captured, jailed and after that brutally lynched. Other IWW members were furthermore jailed.^{[citation needed]} The situation made international headlines, and coupled with thesame actions in Everett, Washington and other lumber towns, stifled the American labor goings-on until the economic devastation of the 1930s Great Depression untouched opinions very nearly labor organizations.

The town’s herald was originally a suggestion to the town’s location as the midway tapering off between Tacoma and Kalama (which were originally the NP’s Washington termini), but proved to have longevity when it became the midpoint amid Seattle and Portland, Oregon as capably during the press forward of Washington’s I-5 allowance of the Interstate Highway System. As extractive industries faced decline, Centralia’s spread refocused upon freeway oriented food, lodging, retail and tourism, as competently as regional shipping and warehousing facilities, leading to 60 percent deposit in population beyond the considering four decades.^{[when?][citation needed]}