Colt, Winchester, and the Arsenal of Democracy

By the middle of the nineteenth century, the Connecticut River Valley between Middletown and Springfield had become the most concentrated arms-producing corridor in the Western world. And at the center of it stood two names that would become synonymous with American firearms: Colt, from Hartford, and Winchester, from New Haven. Samuel Colt received his first patent for a revolving-chamber firearm in eighteen thirty-six, when he was twenty-one years old.

His original company failed. He tried again, and by eighteen fifty-five had built Coltsville, a purpose-built factory complex on the South Meadows of Hartford beside the Connecticut River, capped by a bright blue onion dome that Colt added partly because he liked it and partly because he was a showman who understood branding before the word existed. The Colt revolver equipped cavalry on both sides of the Civil War, outfitted frontier lawmen and outlaws alike, and became so ubiquitous that the equalizer entered American vernacular.

In New Haven, Oliver Winchester reorganized what had been the New Haven Arms Company into the Winchester Repeating Arms Company in eighteen sixty-six, manufacturing lever-action rifles that became the iconic weapon of westward expansion. The Winchester Model eighteen seventy-three was called, without much exaggeration, the gun that won the West. During both World Wars, Connecticut factories converted to wartime production on a scale that dwarfed peacetime output.

Pratt and Whitney, the Hartford machine-tool firm founded in eighteen sixty, gave its name and backing to an aircraft engine company that became a primary manufacturer of engines in the Second World War. Sikorsky Aircraft in Stratford built helicopters that served in Korea and Vietnam and every American conflict since. The state that began manufacturing muskets for the Continental Army in the seventeen seventies never really stopped making things that defended the republic, or threatened it, depending on who was holding the weapon.