Oliver Fisher Winchester was born on November 30, 1810, and died on December 10, 1880. He was an American businessman and politician. He is most famous for starting the Winchester Repeating Arms Company.

Birth and marriage

He was born to Samuel Winchester and Hannah Bates in Boston on November 30, 1810. He married Jane Ellen Hope in Boston on February 20, 1834. They had the following children:

• Ann Rebecca Winchester (1835–1864), who married Charles B. Dye
• William Wirt Winchester (1837–1881), who married Sarah Lockwood Pardee
• Hannah Jane Winchester, who married Thomas Gray Bennett

Career

Winchester was known for making and selling the Winchester repeating rifle, which was a redesigned version of the Volcanic rifle from earlier years. Winchester first worked as a clothing maker in New York City and New Haven, Connecticut. During this time, he learned that a part of Smith & Wesson’s firearms business was struggling financially because one of their new inventions was not selling well. Seeing an opportunity, Winchester gathered money with other investors and bought the Smith & Wesson division, which was also called the Volcanic Repeating Arms Company, in 1855. By 1857, Winchester became the main owner of the company and moved to New Haven, changing its name to the New Haven Arms Company.

At first, the company had low profits, partly because the Volcanic rifle used a weak design. The Volcanic cartridge was a hollow cone filled with black powder and sealed with a cork. While the Volcanic rifle had a repeating mechanism that was better than other guns of the time, the .25 and .32 caliber cartridges it used did not perform well compared to larger cartridges used by competitors.

Winchester inherited a talented engineer named Benjamin Tyler Henry, who helped improve the Volcanic rifle. Henry redesigned the rifle to hold seventeen new brass cartridges of .44 caliber. This improvement helped the company gain attention, and Henry received a patent for his design on October 16, 1860. This new rifle became known as the Henry rifle.

The Henry rifle was made for about six years, with around 12,000 units produced, including models with iron and brass frames. After the success of the Henry rifle, the company was reorganized and renamed the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. In 1866, an employee named Nelson King improved the rifle by adding a side-loading gate and a sealed magazine covered by a stock. The first Winchester rifle, called the Model 1866, was nicknamed the Yellow Boy.

Repeating rifles were used during the American Civil War, but the U.S. Army did not use them widely because they were expensive and too advanced for the war’s tactics. After the war, repeating rifles became more popular among civilians. Military leaders focused on improving single-shot rifles for many years. With thousands of rifles in the hands of settlers, the Winchester repeating rifles became known as “The Gun that Won the West.”

Oliver Winchester was also involved in politics. He served as a New Haven City Commissioner, a Republican Presidential elector in 1864, and as Lieutenant Governor of Connecticut from 1866 to 1867.

When Oliver Winchester died on December 10, 1880, his share of the company went to his son, William Wirt Winchester, who died of tuberculosis in March 1881. William’s wife, Sarah, moved to San Jose, California, and used her inheritance to build a large, confusing house now called the Winchester Mystery House.