The Armory That Armed America and Equipped Lewis and Clark

George Washington recommended this site in seventeen ninety-four for the nation's second federal armory and arsenal, impressed by the water power of two rivers and the transportation advantage of a mountain gap. Construction began in seventeen ninety-nine, and between eighteen oh one and eighteen sixty-one the armory produced more than six hundred thousand muskets, rifles, and pistols, arming much of the American military for six decades.

Its first great historical moment came in the spring of eighteen oh three. A young Army captain named Meriwether Lewis arrived with a government contract and a daunting list. Lewis was equipping what would become the Lewis and Clark Expedition, the first American overland crossing of the continent to the Pacific Coast. He worked here with the armory superintendent to acquire rifles, pistols, powder horns, bullet molds, tomahawks, and knives. The blacksmiths at Harpers Ferry also built a collapsible iron boat frame that Lewis had designed for navigating western rivers. The frame was never successfully used, but the weapons from Harpers Ferry went all the way to the Pacific.

The armory also pioneered one of the foundational ideas of American industrial production. A contractor named Captain John Hall began manufacturing rifles at a dedicated facility on the armory grounds in eighteen nineteen. By the early eighteen twenties, Hall had demonstrated something manufacturers had long struggled to achieve: the production of firearms with completely interchangeable parts, so that components from one rifle would fit any other. The technique he developed there spread across American manufacturing. The industrial revolution in the United States owes a debt to a rifle shop on the banks of the Shenandoah.