Blood, Trauma, and Biohazard Cleanup in Corning, OH

Corning is a village in Perry County in the Sunday Creek Valley, in the heart of southeastern Ohio's "Little Cities of Black Diamonds" coal country.

Corning began as a farming settlement called Ferrara, and everything changed when the Atlantic and Lake Erie Railway completed the Moxahala tunnel in 1879.

In 1880 Joseph Rodgers sold more than 8,000 acres along Sunday Creek to the Ohio Central Coal Company, and with New York capital pouring into the coal camp the town was renamed Corning.

Corning exploded from 271 residents in 1880 to 1,551 in 1890 as coal miners poured in.

On September 19, 1880, the Ohio National Guard fought the Battle of Corning against white coal miners trying to force out newly arrived African American miners — the first time the Ohio National Guard ever shed blood in defense of the state.

Corning was once known as one of the most lawless towns in Ohio, compared in its day to violent western mining towns like Tombstone, Arizona, and Deadwood, South Dakota.

After the mine strikes of the early 1890s, Corning served as the unofficial headquarters of an insurgency against the leadership of the newly formed United Mine Workers of America.

By 1900 three railroads — the Ohio Central, the Zanesville and Western, and the Kanawha and Michigan — converged on Corning, making it a railroad hub, and oil discovered in 1889 still supports local jobs today.

Corning's population has fallen to 488 at the 2020 census, less than a third of its coal-boom peak.

The Corning Museum, which preserves the village's coal-era history, is housed in the old high school building on Corning Avenue, and today's students attend Miller High School in the Southern Local School District — a district formed in 1961 by consolidating the Corning, Hemlock, Shawnee, Moxahala, and New Straitsville schools.