Search
The Whitney Armory was a large complex of buildings with many different purposes, from storage to energy production to gun manufacture. At its heart were the workshop buildings where gun components were prepared and assembled. The workshop buildings evolved over time and were rebuilt entirely after an explosion in 1860. Both the earlier and later buildings lay at the north side of the site, approximately under the outdoor Water Lab and the grassy area at the base of the 1861 Lake Whitney dam.
The First Armory Workshops
There are not many records of the early decades of the Armory, and because it was a working factory, the buildings and machinery were frequently updated, leaving behind little physical evidence. Two important sources for understanding the early Armory are an inventory of the factory made in 1826 after Eli Whitney Sr.’s death and William Giles Munson’s c. 1828 painting of the site. These do not tell us exactly how the Armory looked when Whitney built it, but they tell us a little about how it was operating around the time of his death.
CAPTION: Detail of William Giles Munson, The Eli Whitney Gun Factory, c. 1826-28, showing the Armory workshops and surroundings.
Yale University Art Gallery, 1946.36.
The original Armory had two primary workshops: the machining and filing shop and the stocking shop. In Munson’s painting, the machining and filing shop is the two-story building to the right, topped with an attic and cupola, with a wing extending off its back. In a 1798 letter, Whitney gave the primary building’s dimensions as 72 by 30 feet. The back wing, located close to the dam on the Mill River, may have held a triphammer shop, with water-powered metalworking hammers. The stocking shop is the slightly simpler two-story building to the left. Interestingly, Munson shows the second stories of the workshops connected by a bridge. This detail is not mentioned anywhere else, but it makes sense: it would have allowed workers to transport materials and parts back and forth between the two buildings without having to take them downstairs and back up, saving time and energy and reducing foot traffic.
The machining and filing shop was the heart of the Armory. There, workers used a water-powered drill, a lathe, machines for nitching, stamping, screwing, and polishing, and a wide range of hand tools to refine the gun components created in the forge. The Armory had not yet achieved full precision manufacturing, so while the machines in the shop made the process much more efficient and precise, some milling, filing, and finishing was still done by hand.
The stocking shop dealt with the wooden gun stocks, the part of the gun that holds the barrel, trigger, lock, and other components in place. In the period of Whitney’s first government contract, these standardized stocks were supplied by the U.S. government after being shaped and seasoned (an aging process that makes wood more durable) elsewhere. The metal components then needed to be inserted into the stocks. The workers had to finish the government-supplied stocks by carving the spaces where the metal components would fit, then assembled the gun. Unlike in the machining and filing shop, this work seems to have been done entirely by hand, without water power or modern machines to aid the process.
You can find out much more about the Armory workshops and their activities in Karyl Lee Kibler Hall and Carolyn Cooper’s article “Arms Production at the Whitney Armory.” [LINK]
Learn More
[LEARN MORE: Munson’s Painting]
LINK: Water Power at the Site
LINK: Precision Manufacturing
LINK: Existing “Arms Production at the Whitney Armory” article.
The Later Armory
Between 1825 and 1842, the Armory was under the management of Eli Whitney Sr.’s nephews Philos and Eli Whitney Blake, and then a group of trustees, until Eli Whitney Jr. finished university and arrived to take over operations. In that 17-year period, the Armory, its workshops, and its equipment would have continued to evolve. Whitney Jr. instituted many more improvements to keep up with the rapidly-evolving American gun industry.
In the 1860s, major change came to the Armory site. It is possible that the stocking shop was destroyed by fire in 1860, but it might also have disappeared earlier, as it does not appear on the 1856 survey of the Mill River and its surroundings made in advance of the creation of Lake Whitney. Then, in March 1861, a boiler explosion destroyed the machining and filing shop, injuring at least 16 workers.
Eli Whitney, Jr. took the opportunity to build a new, larger, and more modern primary workshop building, which was completed later that year. Like the previous machining and filing shop, it was a two-story structure with an attic, topped by a cupola for the factory bells. It measured 100 feet by 40 feet, with a front wing making a t-shape. This would have more than doubled the square footage of the previous workshop. It was built from bricks, which were stronger and more fire-resistant than wood. It lay approximately where the Water Lab now is. To its north was a three-story wooden building known as the “Dam Building”, which touched the Lake Whitney dam. It is not clear what parts of the manufacturing process took place in the two buildings.
CAPTION: Advertisement, c. 1862, showing the Whitney Armory after its rebuilding in the early 1860s. The main armory workshop can be seen at center and the dam building stands to its left.
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, HAER CONN,5-HAM,3-21.
The 1861 Armory building can be seen in prints and advertisements, a visual declaration of Whitney Jr.’s quest to improve and modernize his father’s factory. Whitney Jr. also rebuilt other buildings on the site, constructed new workshops and a steel foundry, and built the pumphouse and other buildings for the New Haven Water Company.
The 1861 Armory saw the peak of the Whitney Arms Company’s manufacturing. During the Civil War, the Armory employed over 600 workers.
By the time the Winchester Repeating Arms Company bought the Whitney Arms Company in the 1880s, the 1861 workshop was no longer so modern. The site also had a disadvantage: while it had been built to take advantage of the main transportation of the late 1700s and early 1800s, turnpikes and rivers, it did not have access to the rail network. Winchester soon stopped manufacture at the Whitney Armory, moving all operations to their factory complex in Newhallville, which did have rail access.
CAPTION: The 1861 armory workshop, photographed c. 1930. This view is from the southwest, approximately the same angle as shown in the c. 1862 advertisement.
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, HAER CONN,5-HAM,3-19.
Like the other buildings of the Armory complex, the main workshop buildings were repurposed by the later companies that used the site. However, when they no longer served the new companies’ purposes or were too old to be used, they were torn down. The dam building was torn down in the 1920s, and the brick armory workshops followed in 1949.