Columbia County was formed on March 22, 1813 out of Northumberland County. Columbia was named in honor of Christopher Columbus, the Italian explorer then credited with the discovery of North America. Perhaps the ideacame from a song performed in Philadelphia in 1798 by Joseph Hopkinson, that begins, “Hail Columbia, Happy Land.” A Friends Meeting House was built at Catawissa in 1789, and Bloomsburg, the county seat, was incorporated in 1870. The town of Centralia is now famous for the undergreound gas fires that forced evacuation in the 1980’s. The present day ghost town was once, along with other mining towns in the county, both prosperous and a hotbed of labor unrest during the time of the Molly Maguires.