Elizabeth Colt: The Woman Who Rebuilt the Armory

When Samuel Colt died in January of eighteen sixty-two, he left behind a firearms company valued at roughly fifteen million dollars, a nearly-finished estate called Armsmear, and his wife Elizabeth, who was thirty-five years old. What Elizabeth Hart Jarvis Colt did with the inheritance shaped Hartford as much as anything her husband had built. She assumed controlling ownership of Colt's Patent Fire-Arms Manufacturing Company at the outset of the Civil War, when demand for repeating arms was surging.

She managed the company through its busiest years. When the East Armory burned in February of eighteen sixty-four, the fire that dropped the first blue dome to the ground while Elizabeth watched, she had already taken out insurance on the building. She used it to rebuild, this time with fireproof construction, and had the blue onion dome recreated atop the new structure.

The armory that stands today is substantially her rebuilding. She was known as the First Lady of Hartford. She served for twenty-two years as president of the Union for Home Work, providing childcare, meals, and classes to the children of working mothers.

She founded the Hartford Soldiers' Aid Society at the outbreak of the Civil War and organized supply lines for Union troops. When she died in nineteen oh five, her will gave her art collection to the Wadsworth Atheneum, funded its first wing named for a woman, and bequeathed the grounds of Armsmear to the city as the one hundred forty acres now called Colt Park. She also funded a memorial church to her husband in Coltsville, designed by the same architect who built Mark Twain's house, and had the marble walls carved with guns and gunsmithing tools, so no one would forget what the family made.