Peters Cartridge Company
Ohio
Just off the highway near Kings Mills, a cluster of aging brick and concrete buildings marks what was once one of America's premier ammunition makers. Gershom Moore Peters founded the Peters Cartridge Company here in eighteen eighty-seven, and by eighteen eighty-nine his machinery was stamping out four thousand cartridges per hour. The site was not without tragedy: in July of eighteen ninety, a collision of loaded rail cars set off a massive explosion that killed twelve workers and leveled most of the original plant.
Peters rebuilt in reinforced concrete, survived two World Wars, and by the nineteen thirties had drawn the attention of Remington Arms, which bought the company around nineteen thirty-four. When war production wound down, Remington consolidated everything to Connecticut and the Kings Mills plant went quiet in nineteen forty-four. The ruins are on the National Register of Historic Places today, a monument to the gunpowder era tucked beside the Little Miami River.
