Join with Winchester fans around the world in celebrating the 150th birthday of the founding of the Winchester brand. A century and a half has passed since Oliver F. Winchester first began his journey to create the brand that bears his name. Winchester quickly became a manufacturing powerhouse that helped create and define the Industrial Revolution. It’s a brand whose products, quite literally, have helped change the course of world history. 

The 22nd of May is considered by many as the day of the actual founding of Winchester. 

To better understand the significance of this historic 150^th anniversary, let’s take a look at the backstory - the unique circumstances that lead Oliver F. Winchester to create the brand and products known ‘round the world as “Winchester.” 

In the mid-1800s the world of firearms and ammunition design was quickly evolving. The days of single-shot firearms that were laboriously loaded from the muzzle were fast coming to a close and the race was on to develop a self-contained cartridge – one that incorporated the projectile, propellant and primer into a single package, and to create a reliable repeating firearm that could use such ammunition.

Walter Hunt’s “Rocket Ball” ammunition. Among the notable milestones in this development process was Walter Hunt’s “Volition Repeating Rifle.” (In addition to guns and ammunition, Mr. Hunt also invented the safety pin and the fountain pen.) Patented in 1848, Hunt’s “Rocket Ball” ammunition had a hollow-based lead bullet filled with black powder, which was kept in place by a cork base plug fitted with a small flash hole. “Rocket Balls” were fed from a tubular magazine under the barrel into the chamber where either a “pill primer” or a metallic percussion cap on an external nipple was used to ignite the propellant.

The repeating pistol. In short order several major improvements to the original Hunt design were made by Lewis Jennings and Horace Smith, particularly on the gun’s tubular magazine and feeding system. In turn, Horace Smith soon teamed up with Daniel Wesson and Benjamin Tyler Henry to create a repeating pistol that loaded a self-contained cartridge from the magazine tube by manually working a lever located in front of the trigger, under the receiver. Their ammunition design also improved on the original “Rocket Ball” by adding a priming compound and metal disk to the back of the cartridge. 

The Assets of Winchester Repeating Arms Company were acquired in 1931 by Western Cartridge Company, a predecessor of Olin Corporation. Olin’s founder, Franklin Olin, and his sons John and Spencer were also “captains of American industry” and have been some of the twentieth century's most influential philanthropists in the fields of higher education, public policy and history.

• The Olin libraries at Cornell University, Washington University in St. Louis and Rollins College in Florida are products of their philanthropy.
• The John Olin Foundation was founded in 1953 to defend America’s tradition of free enterprise and individual liberty, and support their extension to benefit as many Americans as possible.
• The law schools at the University of Chicago, Harvard, Stanford, Virginia, and Yale have Olin-sponsored Law-and-Economics centers.
• Programs supported by the Olin Foundation gave rise to the Federalist Society for conservative and libertarian law students, lawyers, judges, and professors and has helped transform legal education and shape the federal judiciary.
• NILO Farms (Olin spelled backward) is a 640-acre hunting preserve in Illinois, and is used in part to research modern game management methods.

The trio of Smith, Wesson and Henry called their new company the “Volcanic Repeating Arms Company,” and one of their early investors was a maker of men’s shirts from New Haven, Connecticut, named Oliver Fisher Winchester. Mr. Winchester was elected to the board of directors in 1855. In time two of the firm’s designers, Mr. Smith and Mr. Wesson, left to pursue the idea of combining their self-contained ammunition with another new development, the revolver. (If you’re a gun person, you know the results of those efforts – it’s called Smith & Wesson.)

As the man who bankrolled the Volcanic firm through difficult times, by 1857 Oliver F. Winchester held all the assets and the firm was renamed the “New Haven Arms Company.” Oliver Winchester soon tasked Mr. Henry with improving the Volcanic ammunition design and developing the Volcanic repeating handgun into a rifle. 

The legendary Henry rifle was born. By the late 1850s Mr. Henry had developed both a fully self-contained .44-caliber rimfire cartridge enclosed by a metallic case, and a better firing mechanism in the rifle that used twin firing pins for more reliable ignition. The design was patented in 1860. 

The President Lincoln connection. As the United States continued her westward expansion and tragically plunged into a Civil War in 1861, Oliver F. Winchester actively sought both military contracts and commercial sales. One of his signature sales methods was to present a beautifully engraved Henry rifle to important decision makers. One such gun was ornately engraved “Lincoln / President / U.S.A.” for none other than Abraham Lincoln.

This priceless rifle now resides in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution. (You might be interested to know that President Lincoln himself was a U.S. patent-holding inventor and an avid student of firearms innovation. It’s said he personally tested several new gun designs by shooting at stumps on a vacant lot next to the White House and was a very competent marksman.)