Ames Manufacturing: Swords, Statues, and Senate Doors

The factory complex that once stood here in Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts, supplied the Union Army with more edged weapons than almost any other company in the country, and then cast the bronze doors of the United States Capitol.

Nathan Peabody Ames and his brother James Tyler Ames moved their cutlery business to the Chicopee River in eighteen twenty-nine, drawn by its water power. Within a few years they had pivoted from knives to swords, winning their first government contract in eighteen thirty-two for the Model eighteen thirty-two foot artillery sword. It was the beginning of a relationship with the federal government that would last through the Civil War.

By the time the war began in eighteen sixty-one, Ames Manufacturing was one of the country's premier weapons makers. The firm built a new factory at Chicopee and became the third-largest producer of edged weapons for the Union, supplying cavalry sabers, officer's swords, and light artillery. Tens of thousands of Ames-stamped blades went to war, and many are still collected today.

But the company's most enduring legacy is not military. In eighteen forty-five, Ames added a bronze foundry under superintendent Silas Mosman Jr. and began casting large sculpture and architectural metalwork. The firm cast major statues for cities and government buildings across the northeast. Its crowning commission came after the Civil War: the bronze doors for the east wing of the United States Capitol, installed in eighteen sixty-eight. Those doors, depicting scenes from the early republic, are still there, swung open every day in Washington by senators and their staffs, made by Massachusetts workers who forged swords on the same foundry floor.

Ames Manufacturing merged into a larger corporate entity in nineteen oh seven. The Chicopee factory complex stood for generations afterward, a brick monument to an era when this small New England city was one of the most important industrial addresses in North America.