Groton, NY

Groton is a Tompkins County village at the center of the Town of Groton, incorporated in 1860 after the older settlement petitioned to separate its local government. Its industrial history is unusually specific: the village made bridges, carriages, road rollers, and typewriters, and the Southern Central Railroad arrived in the 1860s to connect those products with other markets. The Crandall Machine Company moved its early typewriter operation to Groton in 1897; Standard Typewriter began production in 1909, and its Corona line eventually gave the village an international name. Those factories gave the village a name people could recognize outside the county.

Today, Main Street, the village offices, the old industrial buildings, and the surrounding town roads still share the same map. The village's historical facts page keeps the dates of its schools, churches, factories, telegraph line, and railroad close at hand. Groton is a place where a small Finger Lakes village turned manufacturing into a local signature, then carried the memory into its civic center.