Note about Mike Reilley's Site: This site is currently under
re-construction after AOL terminated the Hometown service and Mike's Remembering
Byrnesville site along with it. As we reconstruct the site here, some of
the pages will be incomplete with broken images and missing elements. In
time the site will be re-built in its entirety. Thanks for your patience.
Read more at the bottom of this page about the reconstruction.
Continuing with the story about....
BYRNESVILLE, PA.
A small village in the anthracite coal region of central Pennsylvania that existed from 1856 to 1996. All of the residents moved out of Byrnesville because of the smoke and fumes from the Centralia mine fire.
This page I would like to dedicate to:
REMEMBERING LIFE IN BYRNESVILLE
and what people did for recreation while growing up in the village. We enjoyed many of the
simpler things in life, such as;
We had the freedom to roam and enjoy the many acres of woodland that surrounded Byrnesville. ----
Picking huckleberries, blackberries, chestnuts, and a variety of fruits---
Hunting small game, rabbits, grouse and squirrels. ---
Riding bicycles, motorcycles, motorized go-karts, sledding, ice skating, roller skating and building snowmen. ---
Playing sandlot baseball and basketball outside on grass courts. ---
BYRNESVILLE IN EARLIER YEARS
BYRNESVILLE TODAY
Target shooting with BB guns, 22 cal. rifles, and homemade bows and arrows.
---
Bonfires on July 4th. ---
Potato roast, corn roast, grilling hot dogs on an open camp fire. ---
Enjoying ice cream cones when the ice cream truck came around. ---
Climbing trees, hiking, building shacks, playing hide and seek, swimming in the many water filled holes. ---
Playing poker and other card games. ---
Enjoying the many activities at the Byrnesville gun club, trap shooting, pigeon shooting and picnics.---
Playing pinball machines.---
While the strip mining of coal caused a lot of dirt , noise and inconvenience
it also provided many enjoyable hours of watching giant machines digging
for coal and hauling away the dirt and the coal.
After the holes were finished the large dirt banks that remained were
used by dirt bikers for hill climbing, for sledding and hiking.
Abandoned stripmine truck on Byrnesville street
Truck being dismantled April 2004
We also traveled to neighboring towns to swim, go to movies, watch parades and play in the playgrounds. We traveled to amusement parks such as Reichweins, Buery's grove, Ideal, Springbrook and Knoebles. After 1950, television was added to the things to do. I am sure that there are many things that could be added to this list and I hope former residents will keep us informed about their experiences either by E-mail or the guest book.
These pages about Byrnesville were created
by Mike Reilley and were originally hosted under AOL's
Hometown site under the address hometown.aol.com/mpreil.
When AOL abruptly terminated the hometown sites,
Offroaders.com assisted Mike in restoring his site from
archived web pages, cache pages, backups and other
resources to restore the memory of Byrnesvillle PA and to
give his pages a place to live. Special thanks also
goes to Robert Showalter who had taken the initiative to
make an offline copy of Mike Reilley's site thinking that
AOL may someday discontinue free hometown site services. To contact Mike Reilley,
you can email him here: MPREIL@AOL.COM.
Mike has begun rebuilding his site under Verizon's Mysite
service at this web address:
http://mysite.verizon.net/vzermnw3 Visit his
site to see his latest updates.
Byrnesville, Pennsylvania -
Byrnesville was a small community location just south of the town of Centralia
Pennsylvania. Byrnesville was completely dismantled by 1996 due to
the effects of the Centralia Mine Fire.
Read more about Byrnesville Here.
