The Gun That Won the West Was Made Here
Near New Haven, Connecticut
The weapon that defined the American West was manufactured in New Haven. The Winchester Repeating Arms Company grew from a small New Haven operation called the New Haven Arms Company, which had reorganized in the eighteen fifties around a lever-action rifle design. Its breakthrough came in eighteen sixty, when a mechanic named Benjamin Tyler Henry patented a new rifle that could hold fifteen rounds in a tubular magazine and fire them as fast as the shooter could work the lever.
During the Civil War, the Union government bought fewer than two thousand of them. Soldiers bought another ten thousand with their own money. Confederate Colonel John Mosby, who fought against them, called it that damned Yankee rifle that can be loaded on Sunday and fired all week.
After the war, Oliver Winchester reorganized the company under his own name and introduced the Model eighteen sixty-six. Then came the Model eighteen seventy-three, chambered for a center-fire cartridge, which became the rifle most associated with the frontier. Advertisements called it the gun that won the West. Homesteaders, lawmen, outlaws, and the United States Army all used some version of it. Buffalo hunters used Winchesters. The rifle appeared at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in eighteen seventy-six, where Lakota and Cheyenne warriors used Henrys and Winchesters against the Seventh Cavalry.
The New Haven factory ran continuously for one hundred and forty years, closing in two thousand and six. At its peak, Winchester employed several thousand workers on Munson Street, and the factory was one of the defining institutions of the city's industrial working class. The firearms company outlasted the building. The building became condominiums.
