Samuel Colt and the Blue Onion Dome

Look toward the Connecticut River south of downtown Hartford and you will find a dome unlike anything else on the New England skyline. It is painted deep blue and studded with gold stars, shaped like the onion domes of Russian Orthodox churches, and capped with a gilded rampant colt. This is the East Armory of the Colt Patent Fire-Arms Manufacturing Company, completed in eighteen fifty-five, and it is the most visible remnant of one of the most audacious industrial ambitions of the nineteenth century.

Samuel Colt was born in Hartford in eighteen fourteen and received his American patent for a revolving-chamber firearm in eighteen thirty-six. His early manufacturing attempts in New Jersey failed, but the Mexican War of eighteen forty-six revived his fortunes when the United States government ordered a thousand revolvers. He returned to Hartford determined to build the largest private armory in the world, and he did.

The blue dome came from a specific memory. During a visit to Russia in eighteen fifty-four, Colt had presented Czar Nicholas the First with an engraved gold revolver. He came home impressed by Russian architecture and instructed his architect, Octavius Jordan, to sketch an onion dome for the main building.

The resulting structure, five stories of brick and brownstone, five hundred and eight feet long, became a landmark visible for miles. Colt died in eighteen sixty-two, and his wife Elizabeth took over the company. When a fire destroyed much of the armory in eighteen sixty-four, Elizabeth had the foresight to have already insured the buildings.

She rebuilt, made the structure fireproof, and restored the blue dome, which stands today very nearly as she commissioned it. The complex is now a National Historical Park. For a century and a half, that dome has marked Hartford's skyline like a lighthouse for anyone who understands what it cost to build.