Corning, Missouri: Named for a Railroad Baron, Drowned by the River

The little town of Corning in Holt County, Missouri, was named for Erastus Corning, a New York financier who held major shares in the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy Railroad. The town was platted in eighteen sixty-eight along the railroad's main line between Kansas City and Council Bluffs, and through the late eighteen hundreds it drew a mostly German-speaking population that maintained a German-language school well into the twentieth century. At its peak, Corning held about two hundred seventy residents.

But the town sat dangerously close to the Missouri River, and the floods kept coming, cresting higher and causing more damage each decade. The great floods of twenty eleven and twenty nineteen were the final blows, pushing out the last hardy holdouts. By the early twenty twenties, the population had reached zero.

The village formally dissolved and disincorporated in twenty twenty-three, making Corning officially a ghost, erased not by the railroad's departure but by the river that ran beside it.