Centralia is a city in Lewis County, Washington, United States. It is located along Interstate 5 close the midpoint together with Seattle and Portland, Oregon. The city had a population of 18,183 at the 2020 census. Centralia is twinned later than 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 reduction for stagecoaches vigorous 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 clear African-American. The relations feared Washington would be irritated into slavery if they stayed in Missouri after the passage of the Compromise of 1850. Cochran filed a donation land claim near the Borst Home in 1852 and was clever to sell his affirmation to Washington for $6,000 because unlike the adjoining Oregon Territory, there was no restriction against passing legal ownership of home to African Americans in the newly formed Washington Territory.

Upon hearing of the imminent arrival 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 release to buyers who built houses. Washington as well as donated house for a city park, a cemetery, and a Baptist church. Responding to extra settlers’ concern not quite a town in Klickitat County later the similar 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 gone 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 then 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.

The boom lasted until November 11, 1919, when the infamous Centralia Massacre occurred. Spurred upon by local lumber barons, American Legionnaires (many of whom had returned from WWI to find 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 sticking together 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 later brutally lynched. Other IWW members were plus jailed.^{[citation needed]} The business made international headlines, and coupled with thesame actions in Everett, Washington and supplementary lumber towns, stifled the American labor endeavor until the economic devastation of the 1930s Great Depression distorted opinions practically labor organizations.