During World War I, while John Browning was working on a heavy machine gun that would use a .50 caliber cartridge, Cody Firearms Museum Assistant Curator Danny Michael said Winchester got the Army contract to create that cartridge. “So as they were developing this, they obviously needed a gun to use as a testbed to […]
Originally featured in Points West magazine in Summer 2019 Winchester Herald covers with baseball bat and mitt A Winchester bat? A Winchester mitt? With baseball season well underway, how curious to spot America’s national pastime sporting the name of a rifle? It’s true. “In 1919, attempting to recover from loans taken out to expand for […]
Originally featured in Points West magazine in Summer 2019 Winchester Calendar, 1894 In 1887, Union Metallic Cartridge Company of Bridgeport, Connecticut, introduced an advertising calendar to market its line of ammunition. Not to be outdone by its down-state rival, Winchester Repeating Arms Company in New Haven, Connecticut, also introduced the first Winchester calendar the same […]
The Cody Firearms Museum has a machine rifle gun from the early part of the last century that was ahead of its time in looks and functionality. The Burton Machine Rifle was made by Frank Burton, a Winchester engineer, in 1916 or 17. Otherwise, there is no other documentation of the gun. Danny Michael, the […]
When men went off to fight on the front lines in World War I, many factories and companies replaced their workforce with women and young boys. But the Winchester Repeating Arms Company started employing women as managers even before the war. That’s according to Samantha Harper, the archivist at the McCracken Research Library. “They were […]
During World War I, some Winchester Repeating Arms Company employees were eventually exempt from the draft because their skills were essential to the war effort. “There were a couple of gentlemen that worked for Winchester that actually designed weapons or ran machinery that were so difficult to run that they were deemed as being essential […]