The Company
One of the oldest American corporations that is still in the business for which it was originally founded is a gun company – the Remington Arms Company. And it all began, as gun-makers so often did in those days, with one man, a blacksmith, and a rifle barrel.
The man was Eliphalet Remington II, born in 1793. While working at his father’s forge, young Remington had slight regard for some of the guns that were for sale in the very early 1800s, so he determined to make his own, and did so, hand-forging it in his father’s smithy. A local gunsmith built a rifle around Remington’s barrel, and young Eliphalet took the rifle to a local shooting match. He did well enough, finishing in second place, but his fellow shooters remarked on the quality of his rifle barrel. Next thing he knew, in that fateful year of 1816, the young Remington found himself in the business of making rifle barrels. Within a few years, the Remington company was selling barrels to gunsmiths all over the still-new United States.
Bear in mind that in those years, most guns for the civilian market were hand-made jobs, put together by individual craftsmen. But those craftsmen liked Remington barrels. Remington moved his expanding operation to Ilion, New York, where the Erie Canal offered better transportation for his products. Remington continued to improve, being one of the first to offer cast-steel drilled barrels as opposed to the usual hand-forged designs.
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Then, in 1845, the company got a big boost, as gun companies often did, by one of the oldest of human endeavors – a war.
The Guns
Interestingly enough, when Remington first started making complete guns, the guns weren’t designed by the company. In 1845, the United States was gearing up for the Mexican War, and Eliphalet Remington and his company received a contract from the American military for Model 1841 “Mississippi” rifles. This was the first entire firearm built by Remington, using the newfangled mass production techniques, wherein the guns were built to a standard, with interchangeable parts. Now, Remington wasn’t just a barrel-maker, but a gun manufacturer, and in 1850, the company was reformed as E. Remington and Sons, as Eliphalet’s three sons Phil, Samuel, and Eliphalet III had joined the effort.
The company’s founder, Eliphalet Remington II, died in 1861, and his sons inherited the company. The next few years would prove very profitable indeed for his company, and their increasing success was, again, due to a war. The American Civil War saw Remington scrambling to fulfill contracts for the Union Army and Navy, building rifles, carbines, and revolvers.After the war, though, the three sons of Remington started forging ahead with their own designs. During the war, they had made (among other things) the Model 1858 Army revolver, but it was after the war that their design efforts would really pick up.
Finally, Remington’s Own Designs
Aside from making the newfangled typewriters (yes, they did that, too, and I even have one), Remington started grabbing the post-Civil War American sporting gun market. Until the turn of the century, the company made not only famous rolling-block rifles, patented by a guy named Joseph Rider and built by Remington, but also the famous 1875 Remington revolver, the company’s foray into single-action cartridge revolvers. Some of the better-known efforts in the late 19th century included the bolt-action, tubular magazine Remington-Keene rifle, the Remington-Lee bolt-action rifle, along with a range of single-barrel and double-barrel shotguns.
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The company went from success to success in their designs and manufacturing as the 19th century gave way to the 20th. There were some organizational changes. The end of the Civil War had left the company, still run by the Remington brothers, dealing with hard times with fewer military contracts, so in 1888 the company was reorganized with the help of a money guy, one Marcellus Hartley, and renamed, to a name out of American firearms legend: The Remington Arms Company.
In 1912, the company merged with the Union Metallic Cartridge Company (UMC), which had, even then, one of the more famous headstamps in American ammunition manufacturing. The company moved on as Remington U.M.C, which enabled them to capture a big share of not only the gun but also the ammunition markets. Union Metallic was largely responsible for Remington’s great expansion during the World Wars, thanks in no small part to massive ammunition contracts from the War Department.
There was another name change in the offing in between the wars; in 1934, the company was purchased by chemical giant DuPont, which renamed the gun company as (again) the Remington Arms Company, Inc. A year later, DuPont also acquired the Peters cartridge company; today, Remington ammo still carries the “R-P” headstamp denoting Remington-Peters.
Through the 20th century, Remington moved from success to success, with guns like the famous Model 11, which was a license-built version of the Browning Auto-5 without the magazine cutoff. The Model 721 and 722 rifles, forerunners of the more famous Model 700, also made the company a tidy few dollars. They also made winners like the Model 742 semi-auto sporting rifle and the Model 760 pump-action sporting rifle, which were later modified and offered as the Model 7400 and Model 7600.
Finally, late in the 20th century, Remington moved back into sidearms, making, among other things, 1911-pattern pistols. Loyal sidekick Rat has one, a Remington 1911 R1 Carry, a fitting companion to his Model 700 rifle. He’s happy with them both.
And Now?
Remington, Big Green is still around and remains one of the great names in American gunmaking. They have produced many near-immortal designs, many of which are still being manufactured today: The Model 870 pump shotgun, the Model 700 bolt-action rifle, to name a couple. It’s a proud old American company with a long and storied history. To this day, one can’t really go too far wrong with a Remington, and while I prefer DuPont-era and older Remingtons, that’s of a piece with my preference for pre-64 Winchesters; I tend to prefer old guns, being distinctly aged myself.
Now, I feel I should go online to the auction sites. There’s one empty place in my safe I’ve been kind of saving for a fine old Remington Model 10 Trap grade. Maybe today’s the day?
