Detail of aerial view of The Corning Museum of Glass surrounded by floodwaters. Photo by Jerry Wright. (CMGL 128721)
A sign in the Museum’s Admissions Lobby features a red line and the words “High Water Level, June 23, 1972.” This simple label fascinates visitors, but only hints at the devastating story behind it. The marker doesn’t convey that the flood caught the region largely unaware in the early hours of that June day; or that it scattered display cases and glass objects across galleries, and devastated the Museum’s renowned library; or that 17 people were rescued by helicopter from the roof of the Corning Glass Center. All this from a shallow, placid river a block from the Museum. At the time, former Museum director Thomas S. Buechner described the flood as the “greatest single catastrophe borne by an American museum.”