Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 2,012

This is the grave of Oliver Winchester.

Born in 1810 in Boston, I think Winchester grew up pretty well off, though I’m not totally sure. By the 1850s, he was working as a clothing manufacturer in New York. He already had some capital available and so when he saw that a gun manufacturer in Connecticut was struggling, he saw a financial opportunity and bought it in 1856. That was Smith & Wesson. You’ve heard of that and that’s because Winchester made it one of the biggest gun companies in the nation. Winchester remained it the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. The creation of Winchester and perpetuation of Smith & Wesson as key names in the American gun industry didn’t honestly have too much to do with Winchester himself. Capital creates nothing, workers create everything. In this case, that meant an engineer named Benjamin Tyler Henry. He worked on the problematic Volcanic repeating rifle the company produced and expanded the frame and cartridge for big ol .44 cartridges. This became the Henry repeating rifle and made the company a ton of money. That was in 1860.

Interestingly, Winchester did not really sell that many of his rifles to the military in the Civil War. Basically, Winchesters were too expensive for the military and there was some resistance in the military for paying for top-rate military technology. Rather, the real market was for gun-crazy Americans. It’s true enough that modern gun culture does not go back forever and is related to the rise of the National Rifle Association and far-right fearmongering as part of the backlash to civil rights in the 70s. But it’s also true that Americans are a very violent people through the nation’s history and that Americans have always really liked to own guns and not just for hunting either.

Basically what this meant is that the Winchester became the preferred rifle for the private citizens who committed genocide and did a lot of shooting of each other in the American West after the war. Many years ago, my undergraduate advisor, Richard Maxwell Brown, an expert on American violence and a history professor at the University of Oregon who had served on some of the LBJ-appointed commissions to study violence in the era or urban riots, came up with the awkwardly-named but accurate term “Western Civil War of Incorporation” to describe Reconstruction-era violence in the West. Basically, the forces of order were almost all Republicans, Union veterans, and their hired hacks. The outlaws were almost all Democrats and southerners locked out of the patronage-based power structure of the territories. In short, Wyatt Earp was a northern Republican, Billy the Kid was a southern Democrat (or was when he was old enough to have politics), etc. So they used Oliver Winchester’s glorious invention to kill each other for the next twenty years in the arid west over old and new hatreds.

Winchester was most certainly a good Republican. It’s always interesting to see which politicians people named their kids for back in the day. There was a lot of this. Winchester had one son, born in 1837. He named him for William Wirt, who had died in 1834 and had been James Monroe’s attorney general before moving into the Anti-Mason movement after 1825. Wirt incidentally remains the longest serving Attorney General in American history, sticking around not only for the two Monroe terms but that of John Quincy Adams too. That move to the Anti-Masons was one of the precursors to the rise of the Whigs. This alone goes pretty far to provide strong clues into Winchester’s politics as a younger man. Later, Winchester became Connecticut’s attorney general in 1866. That was only a year term, but it was a good honor for him. Basically, his political career is not interesting, but it is a symbol of the type of guy who would become a locally important Republican right after the Civil War–it was a party by the rich for the rich and more so every year. Not much has changed there!

Winchester died in 1880, at the age of 70, after a stroke. His widow Sarah, who was his second wife, was 29 years younger than he. So she had all this money and was only 41 years old at the time. So she moved to California, became super eccentric, built a huge mansion in San Jose, then kept rebuilding and rebuilding and it became this gargantuan house of a crazy old rich woman. She finally died in 1922 and it shortly became a tourist attraction. You can visit the Winchester Mystery House today, which includes lots of rumors circulating at the time that she was a weird spiritualist who had plans to trap ghosts and the like in it. I have no idea how much if any of that is true, but it’s a fun coda to this grave post.

Oliver Winchester is buried in Evergreen Cemetery, New Haven, Connecticut.

If you would like this series to visit other figures of American gun culture, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Eliphalet Remington is in Ilion, New York and Annie Oakley is in Greenville, Ohio. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.