Watertown Arsenal
Massachusetts
The Watertown Arsenal in Watertown, Massachusetts, was established in eighteen sixteen, after the War of eighteen twelve. The Army built it on the Charles River at Watertown as a depot for receiving, storing, and issuing ammunition, and only later, from the eighteen nineties, turned it to making gun carriages. Over the next century and a half the arsenal grew into a major research and production facility, contributing gun carriages in the Civil War, artillery in both World Wars, and metallurgical research that shaped American weapons development through the Cold War.
At its peak during World War Two, the arsenal employed thousands of workers from surrounding communities. Army manufacturing ended in nineteen sixty-eight, and a materials research laboratory carried on at the site until nineteen ninety-five. The buildings, solid nineteenth-century granite and brick construction, were eventually converted into the Arsenal on the Charles, a mixed commercial development.
The main arsenal buildings now stand on the National Register of Historic Places.
