Groton Village Hall is located at 108 Cortland Street, Groton NY 13073.
Phone: 607‑898‑3966.
Beginnings [1]
The Village of Groton has a rich history of industrial innovation and manufacturing that dates back to the early 1800s. By the mid-1820s the future village, then known as Perrin's Settlement, or Groton Hollow, was the site of a fulling mill and carriage shop. In 1849 the Groton Iron Works were established. The enterprise would evolve into the Groton Iron Bridge Company and later the Groton Bridge and Manufacturing Company and in 1877 began producing prefabricated truss bridges that were known throughout the northeast and Midwest, as well as other products.
Other industries included the Monarch Road Roller Company, woodworking enterprises and apparel manufacturers. The community at the beginning of the twentieth century was a prosperous one, with hundreds of manufacturing jobs, a thriving downtown. The village was served by the Lehigh Valley Railroad with freight and passenger service. It had a progressive local government as well, with a village-owned waterworks and a municipal power plant and street lighting system.
At the turn of the century Groton entrepreneurs grasped the importance of a then revolutionary new technology — the typewriter. Lead by Benn Conger and other local businessmen, the Standard Typewriter Company was formed. The company purchased the patents and rights of another company and began production of typewriters in Groton. Later they changed the company's name to the Corona Typewriter Company, and in 1926 merged with the L.C. Smith typewriter company to form Smith-Corona. By the later 1920s the Groton company had plants in Groton, Syracuse, Cortland and the Midwest. Smith-Corona prospered through the next 50 years before the typewriter was eclipsed by the personal computer. However by the time the Groton plant closed in 1983, the village had already evolved to a large extent into a bedroom community for the much larger employment centers of Ithaca and Cortland.