Corning, New York: The Crystal City on Seneca Land
Near Watkins Glen, New York
The Seneca Nation of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy were stewards of this valley for centuries, living along the Chemung River long before European settlement. First contact with French missionaries came in the sixteen hundreds, and the American Revolution's Sullivan-Clinton Campaign of seventeen seventy-nine burned Seneca villages across this region, scattering their population.
European-American settlers arrived in seventeen eighty-nine. The town was named in eighteen thirty-seven for Erastus Corning, a railroad promoter who connected these valleys to Pennsylvania coal. Glass came later: in eighteen sixty-eight, the Brooklyn Flint Glass Works relocated here from Brooklyn, lured by cheap local coal and the Chemung Canal.
Incorporated in eighteen seventy-five as Corning Glass Works, the company went on to invent Pyrex in nineteen fifteen, the glass envelope for Thomas Edison's lightbulb before that, and in nineteen seventy the world's first low-loss optical fiber, which now carries most of the internet. The city marketed itself as the Crystal City. It still is one, though the crystals are now thinner than a human hair.
