Crime Scene & Biohazard Cleanup Near West Corning Corning, AR

Corning is a city in western Clay County, Arkansas, about two miles west of the Black River, and it is the judicial seat of the county's Western District, one of Clay County's two county seats along with Piggott.

Corning began as Hecht City, a settlement named for brothers Levi and Solomon Hecht, who operated a lumber mill on the Black River; the settlement moved about a mile to its present site in 1871 when the Cairo and Fulton Railroad surveyed its proposed route through the area.

On February 5, 1873, the settlement's name was changed from Hecht City to Corning, in honor of H. D. Corning, an engineer with the railroad, as the first through trains linked St. Louis and Little Rock.

Corning was incorporated on August 6, 1877, as the first incorporated town in Clay County, and an 1881 act of the legislature dividing the county into Eastern and Western judicial districts restored Corning as a courthouse town.

The first issue of the Corning Express, printed on May 6, 1875, was the first newspaper published in Clay County, and the weekly Clay County Courier has been published in Corning since 1880.

Timber built early Corning, with stave mills and sawmills lining the tracks, but the state drainage program that began around 1910 turned the swamplands to farming; rice farming arrived about 1916, and soybeans had supplanted cotton by the mid-1950s.

The J. W. Black Lumber Company, established in the mid-1890s, is the one major lumber company remaining from Corning's timber era, sustained through careful management and reforestation programs.

On January 22, 1918, Corning set the Arkansas record for the highest 24-hour snowfall ever recorded in the state, at 25 inches.

Corning was the site of a large pre-dawn explosion on March 9, 1966, when a munitions railcar blew up, yet remarkably only one minor injury resulted.

Wynn Park in Corning has hosted the Homecoming and Independence Day Celebration since 1944, and the city sponsors a Harvest Festival on the fourth Saturday of each October, with craft booths and antique farm equipment celebrating its agricultural history.