Ames Manufacturing, America's Armorer

Near the Chicopee River just east of Springfield, Nathan and James Ames built a factory in eighteen twenty-nine that would put more bladed weapons into American soldiers' hands than any company before or since.

The Ames brothers started with cutlery and tools in Chelmsford, Massachusetts, but ambition and the Chicopee River's waterpower drew them west. They settled in what would become Chicopee Falls and quickly turned to government contracts. By eighteen thirty-two they were producing the Model eighteen thirty-two foot artillery sword, a broad-bladed cutlass that would arm American soldiers for decades. Cannons, cannonballs, and church bells followed from the same foundry.

The Civil War transformed the operation into something closer to a munitions empire. The Union Army desperately needed edged weapons, and Ames delivered: over two hundred thousand swords in service by the war's end, making them the single largest sword manufacturer in American history. They ranked third among all producers of heavy ordnance for the Union, behind only Fort Pitt Foundry in Pennsylvania and West Point Foundry in New York. Their output included cavalry sabers, naval cutlasses, artillery pieces, and some of the first mass-produced iron cannons in American industry.

What made Ames unusual was the breadth. They were casting bells for New England churches one month and rifled cannon barrels the next. Their reputation was such that the federal government could trust them with both precision cutlery and heavy military ordnance simultaneously.

The company held on through the late eighteen hundreds but never found a civilian peacetime market to replace military contracts. The facility was absorbed into larger industrial combines by the early nineteen hundreds. The Chicopee site passed into other hands. But the swords turned out here armed Gettysburg, Antietam, Cold Harbor, and the Wilderness, the full brutal catalog of the war's worst days.