The town owes its origins and existence to the crystal factory, which was founded in 1756 on the river Gus in the Meshchora area by Akim Maltzov, a merchant. For one hundred and fifty years the factory had remained under the ownership of the Maltzov family, who were even granted the status of noblemen for their achievements in industry.

The settlement of Gus-Khrustalny, which got the status of a town in 1931, remained a memorial to the activities of the Maltzov family.

The settlement of the second half of the 19th - early 20th centuries - factory structures, streets, dwelling houses and community buildings - forms the old part of the town. Originally, the whole settlement was located in the bend of the river Gus, but the river was dammed up and a man-made lake appeared, which divides the settlement into two parts - southern and northern.

The crystal factory, a spinning mill and a weaving factory are in the southern, older part of the town. ''The Maltzov houses" - each one for two families - and big two - and three - story barracks for factory workers form the streets, running parallel to each other and arranged in a regular rectangle around the church of St. Joachim and St. Anna (1916) which towers up in the center of this part of the town. The factory warehouse "of dry goods and foodstuffs" - the trade rows of twenty compartments with columns, galleries and balconies - was built in 1853 at the intersection of Bolshaya Yakimanskaya and Pervaya Ivanovskaya streets. The stone two-story hospital with several annexes next to it could survive from 1855. The chapel of St. Barbara (1882-1885) was preserved in the southern end of the settlement. Recently it was handed over to the orthodox parish.

Another, northern part of the settlement also having the rectangular lay- out and regular network of streets, emerged at the end of the 19th century. And here, wooden houses built in the second half of the 19th century for railway workers stand along Voksalnaya street as before. The ensemble, including the cathedral of St. George, an almshouse, a rectory and a parochial school has always been the center of this part of the township. The cathedral of St. George was built in 1892-1903 according to a design by Leonti Benois, a famous architect and professor of Russia's Academy of Arts. The cathedral resembles an old-russian church with its refectory, chapels, tents over the belfries, galleries, window-frames, white stone ornaments and everything in shining and gleaming with radiant light.

Not everything could survive inside the church. In 1926 the cathedral was rebuilt into "the house of labour", and it is not possible to reconstruct everything as it was before that. But the main thing - the cathedral itself - could survive and it was restored. Today it houses the Museum of Crystal", a branch of the Vladimir and Suzdal museum-reserve. And the cathedral itself and the Museum of Crystal shine like a real pearl in the routine of everyday life of a provincial town of glass-makers. h2>Weather in Gus-Khrustalny