Colt's Armory: The Factory That Armed a Nation
Near Hartford, Connecticut
The building with the blue onion dome on Hartford's south end is one of the most distinctive industrial landmarks in America. That is the Colt Armory, built by Samuel Colt in eighteen fifty-five as the largest private armament factory on earth.
Samuel Colt was a Hartford native born in eighteen fourteen who by his twenties had patented a revolving-cylinder firearm mechanism that allowed a gun to be fired multiple times without reloading. The patent came in eighteen thirty-six, but his first manufacturing venture failed within a few years. It was the Mexican-American War and then the chaos of westward expansion that revived demand for his revolvers and revived Colt's fortune. By the mid-eighteen fifties he was rich, ambitious, and ready to build.
In eighteen fifty-five, Colt completed his new Hartford factory on reclaimed land along the Connecticut River, incorporating his business as Colt's Patent Fire Arms Manufacturing Company. The plant was a marvel of the industrial age. It used interchangeable parts and an organized assembly line that could produce one hundred and fifty weapons per day. Nothing else in private hands matched its scale.
For the main building, Colt wanted something visible and unforgettable. He had traveled to Russia in eighteen fifty-four to present firearms at the court of Czar Nicholas the First, and he was taken with Russian Orthodox church architecture. He instructed his architect to put an onion dome atop the East Armory, and had it painted a deep cerulean blue and crowned with a bronze rearing colt. The blue onion dome has been a Hartford landmark ever since.
Colt died in January of eighteen sixty-two, just as the Civil War was driving his factory to its greatest output. His widow Elizabeth kept the operation running. During the war, the Hartford plant supplied the Union Army with half a million firearms, one of the largest armament contracts of the conflict.
The factory burned in February of eighteen sixty-four, but Elizabeth Colt rebuilt it immediately, dome and all. The complex produced firearms through the twentieth century, the revolver, the Single Action Army, the Model nineteen eleven pistol, before the site was finally converted to apartments and cultural spaces. The blue dome still presides over the Connecticut River valley.
