The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
2 CENTURIES OF RIFLES
Iconic manufacturers made New Haven home
NEW HAVEN — What successful maker of high-end shirts started a firearms manufacturing company that in later years employed some 20,000 people as part of the largest industrial enterprise in New Haven?
Oliver Winchester, realizing the need for improved armaments after the Civil War and as Americans headed West, formed the Winchester Repeating Arms Co. in New Haven in 1866.
He and his partners bought up patents, corralled investors and assumed a controlling interest in other firearms companies.
It was a pattern repeated many times throughout Winchester’s history as it rolled with the country’s economic ups and downs, joined with competitors or was bought out by them.
“It turns out Winchester was a brilliant businessman,” Matthew Nemerson, the city’s economic development administrator, said of the 19th century entrepreneur who pursued development of the lever-action rifle and invested heavily in the fast-growing and lucrative firearms industry.
Investors started coming to him, given all the money he had made from the shirt company on Court Street next to Strouse and Adler, with the idea that repeating rifles were the next big thing.
His story is one of many manufacturing successes in New Haven before and after the beginning of the 20th century.
It advanced in spurts, but also suffered setbacks. It had exponential growth during the world wars, but that was tempered by
the debt needed to expand.
In the end it was hobbled by a lack of investment, after being taken over by a subsidiary of the Olin Corp., but it continued to exist for 140 years and offered employment even as the number of positions continued to drop.
Nemerson said there were numerous gun and ammunition manufacturers in 19th century New England spurred by the presence of the federal armory in Springfield, Mass.
When the Winchester Repeating Arms Co. opened its doors, three other companies already were turning out rifles in New Haven: the Volcanic Repeating Arms Co., the New Haven Co. and the Henry Repeating Co .
Nine years before that, Winchester had bought a controlling interest in Volcanic, which had a talented staff, including Horace Smith and Daniel B. Wesson, according to a company history.
Inventors Benjamin Tyler Henry and Nelson King joined them and, with Winchester’s considerable reserves, the company was born on May 22, 1866.
The Henry rifle was popular with homesteaders, and the production of this firearm was the company’s first success, as well as the sale of 30,000 rifles to the Ottoman Empire’s army. The mainly sports-shooting company was always a major producer of armaments during conflicts around the world.
Like today’s endorsements by celebrities, Winchester associated its rifles with an American West that may have never existed, but held great appeal for generations here.
The groupies who coveted the ever-evolving Winchester rifle included Annie Oakley, Theodore Roosevelt, Ernest Hemingway, John Wayne and William “Buffalo Bill” Cody, among others.
“He was brilliant at marketing the macho aspect of the Winchester gun — “The Gun that Won the West.” Long before the Marlboro Man was invented, Winchester presented this idealized idea of the cowboy and the rancher, all of these people with their Winchester rifles,” Nemerson said.
Winchester and his partner John Davies, sold the clothing factory on Court Street to Strouse and Adler. Both buildings in turn have been converted to apartments owned by PMC Property Group.
His first gun factory was in Bridgeport, but by 1871 he had outgrown it and wanted a large piece of flat land with access to the railroad, nearby housing and workers.
Winchester settled on the site of the Newhall Carriage Co. at Munson and Canal streets, which had a railroad and freight yards. It also was easy to bring in coal for a power plant that was the largest in the state at the time.
Starting with fewer than 100 workers when it was founded in 1866, Winchester by its 50th anniversary in 1916 had nearly 18,000 employees.
World War I accounted for the explosion in output and workers, but it also changed it forever, weakening the company financially as it took on massive debt to accommodate government contracts and later made bad investments.
By the end of 1915, it had gotten $47.5 million in orders, necessitating a huge upgrade. The $13.3 million expansion needed to meet the contracts for European countries wiped out any profit.
Faced with excess capacity at the end of the Great War, the firearms maker tried its hand at producing consumer goods such as knives, roller skates and even refrigerators during the 1920s. That never caught on and, bumping up against the Great Depression, Winchester Repeating Arms went into receivership in January 1931.
By the end of that year, the Western Cartridge Co., one of the Olin Corp.’s companies, had bought Winchester at a bankruptcy auction. Four years later, Western and Winchester merged to form the WinchesterWestern Co.
A need for workers
An important aspect for New Haven, Nemerson said, was the fact that the firearms business was so labor intensive. It needed people and the staff, after Winchester died in 1880, were very open to the idea of immigrant labor.
Winchester and Sargent, which made hardware, were welcoming to immigrants and helped the large number who immigrated here to work, Nemerson said.
He said Winchester would send an agent to Italy to recruit people. When the new employees got to the U.S., they were taught English, baseball and ballroom dancing, as part of a cultural plunge. The boom was from the 1890s up through World War I, when the company would supply the Europeans with guns.
At one time there may have been as many as 20,000 people working for the company, but regularly between 8,000 and 15,000.
“The high point of Connecticut industry probably came together in 1917-1918. Every factory in the city was making uniforms, they were making hats, they were making buttons and carriages for the military. We were known as the Supply City, the Supply State,” Nemerson said.
The production of rifles was again running full tilt during World War II, with 20,000 workers at Winchester after a production slump in the 1930s.
Nemerson said the people in the Newhallville and Dixwell neighborhoods were making good money and buying their own homes as long as the employment lasted, contributing to a stable community.
Times changed
Douglas Rae, a professor of management and political science at Yale University, published a synopsis of his take on the declining years at Winchester Repeating Arms starting with the economic and labor issues.
Winchester, essentially a division of Olin Corp., was showing losses during the 1960s and 1970s. In 1977 it was as high as $6.07 million and $7.22 million in 1978, something the company couldn’t tolerate.
Organized as machinists Local 609 in 1955, the union had won good contracts for decades, but a strike in 1969 pushed Olin to substantially cut the workforce, Rae wrote.
On the one side, the company wanted to enforce production mandates, while the union said the machinery was unreliable for lack of company investment. If the union wanted to see firearms production stay in New Haven, Olin said the plant would have to meet those standards.
On Oct. 1, 1979, some 600 to 700 striking workers blocked the plant so replacements could not pass. For two days, thenMayor Frank Logue ordered the plant closed to avoid bloodshed. The court, however, agreed with Olin that Logue could not do this and it was re-opened.
The bitter labor action continued for half a year. Olin, on Dec. 12, 1980, decided to close its operations in New Haven, having lost $25 million in production during the strike.
“The Winchester strike was a rapid disaster wrapped in a slow catastrophe: The city’s 9,300 factory wage-earners of 1972 would dwindle to 5,700 in 1987; 3,500 in 1992; 2,804 in 1997; and an estimated 2,500 in 2006,” Rae wrote.
“The impact was of course magnified and deepened by the community’s longstanding dependence on manufacturing jobs and the cash they pumped into the local economy,” the professor wrote.
In a new iteration for the Winchester workers, Olin in December 1980 sold the assets of the firearms production to its workers, who then formed a new company, incorporated as the U.S. Repeating Arms Co.
As the bad times continued, U.S. Repeating Arms went bankrupt in 1989 and was bought by a French holding company, which then sold it to Belgian arms maker Herstal Group.
On January 16, 2006, U.S. Repeating Arms said it was closing the New Haven plant after producing Winchester rifles and shotguns there for 140 years.
New uses
It may take awhile, but in many cases New Haven will look to rejuvenate an area when a major institution fails.
At the 80-acre former Winchester site, with the help of the state and Yale University, multiple buildings now are housing start-up biotech firms at the Science Park Development Corp., which once was headed by Nemerson. The university also moved some 800 of its employees to the site.
The firearms plant at Winchester and Hillside avenues has been converted to a high-end apartment complex — Winchester Lofts — featuring art and memorabilia connected to the longtime armsmaker that sustained generations of New Haven workers,
The rehabilitation work was done in 2015 by Forest City Enterprises and has 158 apartments. In 2012, Carter Winstanley developed 140,000 square feet of office space in another part of the complex, with a large portion devoted to Higher One, a financial services company.
Preston Maynard, an active preservationist, said it has turned out great.
“It is an amazing story, given the size of the complex and how long it had been empty,” Maynard said.
He said the tax credits connected to the National Register of Historic Places are an important element for these projects. “It is such an addition to the community,” Maynard said of the upgrade. The apartments also were backed by federal conservation funds, and state help.
Across town
Another iconic armsmaker, across town, was the Marlin Firearms Co. at 85 Willow St. in the East Rock neighborhood, producing sporting arms.
The precursor to the company was started in 1870 by John Marlin, who made several award-winning firearms and the synchronized machine gun used on airplanes.
When it went bankrupt, Frank Kenna bought the real estate and buildings for $100 and a $100,000 mortgage, according to a remembrance by his son, Frank Kenna Jr., published in 1974.
Like the Winchester Repeating Arms Co. , Marlin from 1941-45 did a lot of war work. This included M1s, carbines, airplane fittings and submachine guns.
In the years after World War I, Kenna became known as the man who would help returning soldiers start up a business, which included some advice from him and use of his surplus factory space to work out their ideas.
The younger Kenna said during the tough 1920s economy, the company was sustained by the rents his father would charge for those startups, while simultaneously helping the soldiers
Frank Kenna Jr., in his address to the Newcomen Society, talked about the 11 percent federal excise that was levied by Congress on every gun as a way to promote conservation.
“(P)eople in the rifle and ammunition business were among the first to realize that we’ve got to have conservation in forests, rivers and streams to ensure the propagation of game. It took them many years before they were successful in doing this, but the industry was one of the early pioneers in conservation,” he said.
Marlin products also were a reflection of the culture.
In 1937, Marlin went into the razor blade business, but got out of it in 1968 “because all these young fellows were letting their beards grow long. If you subtract the square inches of shaving and add a long-lasting stainless steel blade, there’s no market,” Frank Kenna Jr. said.
The company also pioneered the four-day work week, Kenna told the audience, schedules that worked because people like choice.
Marlin got out of war work in 1954, concentrating instead on sporting rifles and shotguns.
The original Marlin building on Willow Street currently is home to a variety of businesses. Marlin moved to North Haven in 1968 and then to North Carolina in 2011 after the Remington Arms Co. acquired Marlin in 2008.
In another example of a compatible reuse, the North Haven plant has now been taken over by another New Haven business, the C. Cowles Co.