In the 1870s, an offshoot of New Haven’s Canal Street was renamed to honor the sprawling new factory that’d been built there. The complex was one of the biggest in both the city and the state, and by the late 19th century, the products its occupants made were world-renowned. By the early 20th century, the enterprise within its strong brick walls was the single-largest employer of New Haveners, and it was earning sizable profits, netting an inflation-adjusted $35 million in the year 1900 alone.
It was the headquarters of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, and parts of the complex—now redeveloped into apartment complexes—still stand today, as do some of the other additions the Winchester family made to the city.
The creator of that dynasty, Oliver Fisher Winchester, had been a shirt manufacturer. But seeing the untapped business possibilities of “repeating” rifles—“Probably,” he said, the ability to fire multiple rounds before reloading “will modify the art of war; possibly it may revolutionize the whole science of war”—he jockeyed for control of the local Volcanic Repeating Arms Company starting in 1855. On the bones of that enterprise, Winchester rebranded it the New Haven Repeating Arms Company—it wouldn’t be called Winchester until 1866—and doggedly sought to make it profitable.
One of the entrepreneur’s prospects was the federal government, a.k.a. the Union, during the Civil War. His sales pitch went something like this: “Where is the military genius that is to grasp this whole subject, and so modify the science of war as to best develop the capacities of this terrible engine—the exclusive control of which would enable any government (with resources sufficient to keep a half a million of men in the field) to rule the world?” Foregoing world domination, the government didn’t become a customer, but some of its soldiers took it upon themselves to buy Winchester’s superior rifles, which are credited in hindsight with leading the Union to victory in certain battles and inspiring fear throughout the Confederacy.
The company’s first major success was the “Henry” rifle, released in 1860. The Model 1866, named for the year it was released and nicknamed the “Yellow Boy” for its yellowish tinge, was the next to receive acclaim. But by far the most influential was the Model 1873, still known as “the gun that won the West” (and apparently still manufactured, no doubt with modern updates, by Browning Arms Company, a Utah-based subsidiary of Belgian company Fabrique Nacionale that licenses the Winchester trademark). Along the way, the rifle became the favorite of frontiersmen, soldiers and those who romanticize them. In newspapers, magazines, books and—much later—movies and television, it became the Western genre’s weapon of choice, appearing in the hands of countless fictional cowboys and lawmen.
Less fictional, more local Winchester contributions have also survived the test of time, albeit in changed forms. Oliver was one of the sponsors of the construction of New Haven City Hall, built in 1861 and retaining its original main facade. Some of the bones of the Winchester factory itself, after falling into decay and being redeveloped in phases, have now been converted into a pair of luxury apartment complexes: the Winchester Lofts and The Winston. The Celentano Biotech, Health and Medical Magnet School was once the Winchester Astronomical and Physical Observatory of Yale. Finished in 1882, it rivaled the best observatories of the age.
Following Oliver’s death in 1880 at the age of 70, his surviving family continued to change New Haven’s landscape. Since 1847, Yale had had a separate science institution, the Yale Scientific School, later renamed the Sheffield Scientific School. To its efforts, Jane Winchester, Oliver’s widow, donated $250,000 and a large hall, which stood where the Becton Center is today. Meanwhile, in 1901, the couple’s daughter, Hannah Jane, donated the Jane Ellen Hope Winchester Building, which was used as Yale’s health clinic until 1960. Now known as the Jane Ellen Hope Memorial Building, it serves as the Yale School of Medicine’s “major teaching facility,” according to the school website.
One of the last large gifts the Winchester family made to the area was a tuberculosis hospital funded by Hannah’s sister-in-law, Sarah Winchester. Named for her husband, who died of the disease, the stately William Wirt Winchester Memorial Hospital, constructed in West Haven in 1918 on Campbell Avenue, is now the West Haven Veterans Affairs Medical Center, while, over at Yale New Haven Hospital, the Winchester Center for Lung Disease carries on the underlying mission Sarah intended her hospital to pursue.
Sarah Winchester is a fascinating figure in her own right. The daughter of a craftsman and a member of the locally prominent Pardee lineage who married into the Winchester family, she would endure a series of personal tragedies before becoming the subject of one of America’s most compelling ghost stories—a story we’ll relate in tomorrow’s edition.
Written by Anne Ewbank. Image, featuring a window into a now-demolished portion of the Winchester factory, photographed by Dan Mims. This updated story was first published on March 30, 2017.
