The Cartridge Works

On the eastern edge of downtown Bridgeport, not far from where the Pequonnock River empties into Long Island Sound, there once stood a shot tower one hundred and ninety feet tall, the tallest building in Connecticut when it was finished in February of nineteen oh nine. It was part of the Union Metallic Cartridge Company, one of the most important ammunition manufacturers in American history, and it operated from a factory complex in Bridgeport that eventually stretched for blocks.

The Union Metallic Cartridge Company was founded in Bridgeport in eighteen sixty-seven, in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, when metallic cartridges had just replaced paper cartridges as the standard for military and sporting firearms. The timing was perfect. The company grew rapidly, and the shot tower, when it opened, was a marvel of industrial engineering: molten lead was dropped from a height of one hundred and thirty-three feet into vats of cold water below, producing perfectly spherical lead shot by surface tension and gravity alone.

On May fourteenth, nineteen oh six, a powder magazine on Success Hill, part of the UMC complex, was destroyed by explosion. Sixteen tons of gunpowder detonated. There were no deaths, but the blast was felt as far away as Long Island across the Sound.

Remington Arms acquired the company in nineteen twelve, and Bridgeport became the corporate headquarters of the merged Remington-UMC operation. The Bridgeport plant manufactured ammunition through World War One and World War Two, employing tens of thousands of workers. Production at Bridgeport finally ended in nineteen seventy. The shot tower stood until the factory complex was demolished. Where it stood is now a parking lot near a highway ramp, the kind of ending that fits an industrial Bridgeport that outlived its own industries.