Winchester’s Lost History Comes Alive

If you closed your eyes, you could imagine hearing the factory whistle blow and seeing thousands of workers streaming past Joan Cavanagh and Jeanne Criscola the other day.

They stood at the corner of Winchester Avenue and Munson Street, where as many as 20,000 New Haveners at a time rushed past to manufacture rifles around the clock for customers the world over.

If you opened your eyes, you would have seen a woman walk out the front door of what used to be the main entrance to the factory complex — but which now leads to trendy exposed-brick residential ​“lofts” renting for as much as $3,975 a month. You’d have seen a scattering of lunchers at tables outside Fussy Coffee, where the tuna sashimi poke bowl sells for $14 and a large nitro cold brew can set you back $5.25. Right past them, cyclists and joggers traversed a trail that once upon a time was a canal and then railroad tracks.

Cavanagh has spent years documenting not what’s happening now on those blocks, but what happened from 1870 through 2006 when iterations of the Winchester Repeating Arms churned out those rifles (which John Wayne helped make famous as the ​“Gun that won the West”). Back when New Haven was a factory town that happened to have pockets of college kids running around.

The Winchester story is an integral part of New Haven’s history. Yet unlike, say, pizza or Yale University, it has been woefully ignored.

Until now. Cavanagh, working with colleagues in the Greater New Haven Labor History Association (for which she served as director and archivist), has published a book about the plant and its people called ​“Our Community at Winchester.”

Designed by Criscola, the book is packed with evocative photos, detailed business history, and the dreams and daily experiences of the workers that kept the plant humming. In the tradition of ​“history from below,” it shows us not just why Winchester mattered to the world of weaponry, but also what it meant for the human beings whose lives and community were shaped by the work there. It shows the glory of a national brand that gave working-class families a living wage and pride of craftsmanship and nourished the economy of the surrounding Newhallville and Dixwell neighborhoods. It also shows the underbelly of labor struggle and an economy dependent on churning out implements of death.

That presented conflicting emotions for Cavanagh, who has dedicated her life to labor and social-justice causes. Winchester experimented with manufacturing shirt and roller skates and watches and flashlights. It briefly experimented with worker-management shop-floor innovations. But its succession of owners reverted to a business model wholly reliant on its core rifle product and traditional workplace relations.

“The story is a complicated one,” Cavanagh writes in the book.

“Guns were its reason for being. Neither the commodity produced or the company’s practice of selling it to whomever would buy it, no matter the use to which it would be put or into whose hands it might fall, were rarely, if ever, challenged, at least publicly, by any of the workers’ advocates (including their unions), by city officials, or by the workers themselves. …

“[A]s someone whose anti-war beliefs often took me to Groton to protest the building of nuclear submarines at General Dynamics’ Electric Boat Shipyard and to other weapons production facilities as well, I did not always find it easy to reconcile the product that was being made at Winchester with the workers’ just demands.”

Her outlook in no way prevented Cavanagh from compiling a comprehensive look at the history, a book that will guide our understanding of our city’s heritage and its continuing challenges for generations to come.

Much of the information comes from the company itself, including through the company’s own newspapers, Winchester Live and Winchester News. The factory complex was a city unto itself, with three shifts a day, drama clubs, other social activities that bound people beyond the confines of their work stations.

Other information comes from newspapers published by the United Electrical Workers and the International Association of Machinists. The former sought to unionize the Winchester workers in the 1940s, foiled by blatantly illegal union-busting tactics than even NLRB decisions couldn’t stop. The latter succeeded in 1955.

By that time the factory was on its downhill slope, looking for new markets, selling to new owners, propped up by government welfare that failed to reverse the decline.

Clippings from newspapers like the old New Haven Journal Courier revisit strikes that hit the complex in 1962, 1969, and 1979 …

… when cops (pictured) attacked picketers seeking to block temporary workers from crossing strike lines.

Most of all, interviews with workers and their families — wisely laid out in separate sidebar boxes throughout the book — bring the story home. How meaningful the work could be. How mean the bosses could be. How unionization opened new opportunities for advancement, especially for Black workers, and put more food on families’ tables.

Various members of the labor association conducted the interviews over the years; some of the subjects have since passed away.

The book grew out of a 2013 exhibit the labor association staged at City Hall. Cavanagh has added some much more to the book. It’s a joy not just to read, but to leaf through and look at. When you complete the journey, you’ll feel that much more connected to our city.

In Our Community at Winchester, we meet Westley McElya, who worked his way up to overhead crane operator in the rolling mill and eventually won back wages lost when the company locked out union workers. We meet Raymond Simms, who worked as a Winchester electrician, whose mother worked in the battery shop, whose brother worked in gun assembly. State Sen. Martin Looney describes how his father was shifted to a more grueling assignment for supporting an organizing drive, then brought home more money and was able to help Black workers fight discrimination as a shop steward after the union’s victory.

In the book, Lawrence Young recalls becoming one of the first African-Americans hired in the woodworking department, in 1943, and remained working there for 43 years. He took pride in working by hand ​“on the most expensive stocks at Winchester” and ​“finish[ing] guns for President Roosevelt, President DeGaulle, and mostly all the presidents and prime ministers that came to Washington.”

We also meet Marcia Biederman, a writer who during a temp job at the factory discovered that the company was illegally shipping guns to South Africa to shoot Black anti-apartheid protesters. She exposed the story in the New Haven Advocate, leading to a government fine against the company (and, later, inspiring Biederman to write an entertaining novel loosely based on the experience.)

The last chapters of Cavanagh’s book (buy it here) follow the company demise in 2006, then the Yale-connected tech-incubator park that has grown in its wake, along with luxury housing at ​“Winchester Lofts” (and more planned, according to this announcement this week). The 19th and 20th century factory town has become a 21st century ​“eds and meds” city. That story is only beginning. If we’re lucky, some day someone like Cavanagh will document that one, as well.