Gunmakers Richard Lawrence and Nicanor Kendall partnered to produce high-quality firearms and, with the help of a businessman named Samuel Robbins, in 1844 signed a government contract to produce ten thousand service rifles. The United States Army required large quantities of rifles, helping to give rise to the initial spark of ingenuity in Windsor.
On the cavernous shop floor the early history of the Windsor factory is related. The technology spread out from Windsor to the rest of New England, the United States, and across the world.Ī permanent exhibition at the American Precision Museum called “Shaping America”guides visitors through the development of American manufacturing, beginning with this iconic building. This was a new way of manufacturing using precisely engineered and produced parts that could be easily interchanged. One of the first places where machine tools were created and used, Windsor is an important part of the origin story for what came to be known as the American system of manufacturing. The museum, housed in an old brick factory building that served at various times as a textile mill, armory, sewing-machine factory, and machine tool shop, is perched atop the rushing Mill Brook and celebrates Windsor’s important role in the history of American manufacturing and technological innovation. While Springfield came to be strongly associated with the machine tool industry, much of the technology was conceived about twenty miles upriver in the town of Windsor, Vermont, where this often overlooked piece of history is celebrated at the American Precision Museum.
Machine tools make highly specialized and identical parts for guns, consumer products, and auto, train, and airplane components, parts that can be interchanged and pro-duced with speed and accuracy. In the latter half of the nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth, the noisy, shuddering workshops along the river were the nurseries for a new kind of manufacturing: the production of machine tools. True or not, the rumor references the unique history of this stretch of the Connecticut River Valley.