Eliphalet Remington

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Eliphalet Remington (October 28, 1793 – August 12, 1861) designed the now-famous Remington rifle.

He was born in 1793 in the town of Suffield, Connecticut, to parents whose origins lay in Yorkshire, England. He was a blacksmith, and at 23, he hand-made a revolutionary sporting rifle using a firing mechanism bought from a dealer, producing the barrel himself.

The gun received such an enthusiastic response that Remington decided to manufacture it in quantity, and formed the firm of E. Remington and Sons, which he headed until his death in 1861. By the mid-1800s the gun had become immensely popular with American sportsmen and was one of the standard guns used in what has been called "the winning of the West".

The company continued to grow and to develop its product and gradually began the manufacture of other sporting goods, such as bicycles. At the present time, the company is known as the Remington Arms Co., Inc.

What began as a one-man enterprise has become one of the world's leading manufacturers of sporting arms. Before the Remington Company was formed, American sportsmen relied upon foreign sources for the majority of the sporting guns they used. The production of a rifle within the reach of men who wanted and needed a good gun changed the picture permanently.

Eliphalet and Elizabeth Remington's second child was a son, Eliphalet II, named for his father. As the couple's only son of their four children who survived childhood, Eliphalet II followed in his father's footsteps and entered the blacksmith trade at the family's rural forge in Herkimer County, New York.

Situated in the Mohawk River Valley — the eastern gateway to the expanding Northwest Territory and in the path of the still-to-be-constructed Erie Canal — the fieldstone Remington forge was astride a trade route that would bring prosperity to the family and the other inhabitants of the region. The expansion of population and wealth along that conduit of commerce would cause Eliphalet Remington to enter the arms making business.

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