Kirk W. House Livres

Lenses for railroad lanterns, cut glass for the White House table, Thomas Edison's first light bulb-the glass for all of these was made in Corning, the glass capital of America, the Crystal City. From 1880 to World War I, newfound wealth sparked a spending and building boom that shaped the city. Corning recaptures the city's gilded age, the boom days when tax-free fortunes could be made-and lost-overnight. Vintage photographs show elephants and buffalo parading down Market Street, the Drake family giving recitals on its home pipe organ, churches and public buildings rising, carriages giving way to motorcars, and huge summer homes springing up on the Finger Lakes.

Erwin and Painted Post are home to major facilities of Corning, Inc., formerly known as Corning Glass Works, a company that made a powerful impact on Erwin's history. In Erwin, folks poured steel, tried out the exotic 1920s military vehicle seen on the cover, and attended family Christmas parties at Ingersoll-Rand. Many of these photographs come from before those high-tech and heavy-industry days, when men rafted lumber down to Gang Mills and farmers relied on equipment that required more horses than men. Over 200 years, Painted Post folks erected four figures of Native Americans. They all still exist and are captured in images here, as are Painted Post High School, the Townsend's Grove Post Office, the Erwin family's fine homes, and life in Cooper's Plains, both then and now. A century and a half of railroading and a century of floods--including the catastrophic Hurricane Agnes in 1972--have altered the landscape. Images of Colonial Days, drill teams, old-time grocery stores, Costa's Field, and even the Civilian Conservation Corps recall a bygone time in local history.