Ben Nicholson

With 2016 being the two-hundredth anniversary of the Remington Arms Company, it is no surprise that the Remington Firearms Museum is “Where the history of a company tells the history of a country.” Remington has survived for two centuries by manufacturing precision goods during periods of war and peace. Alongside the Museum’s guns, there are Remington typewriters, sewing machines, cash registers, knives and a bicycle.

Research and Development departments of firearm manufacturers necessarily maintain ‘factory reference collections’ of other manufacturer’s weapons, as well as having a place to keep their own prototypes and experimental guns. Remington has its own R & D Gun Library and a repository for significant weapons that it keeps in the Remington Archive Room. Neither facility is open to the public. Remington’s first museum opened in 1960 and the current museum opened in 1980 and has remained largely unchanged for the last thirty-five years. Remington has loaned rare guns to the Cody Firearms Museum and to the National Sporting Arms Museum at Bass Pro Shops.

The museum is well designed and has a fair balance between guns, explanatory text and graphics. It also has a good showing of original artwork, used for advertising Remington, that illustrates the sporting side of the manufacturing story. The museum’s displays are organized into types of firearm, such as Percussion, Rolling-Block Rifles, Revolvers, Shotguns, Pocket Pistols and “The Gallery” of famous or infamous guns. Highlights include Parker shotguns, Remington-Elliot pocket pistols designed by a dentist, and the 1,000,000^th and 10,000,000^th gun manufactured.

There is no online presence of the museum, or its archives, and the Remington website does not discuss its museum. The Remington Society of America produces the RSA Journal and each year sends a team of volunteer researchers to the Remington archives. The RSA annually curates a rotating exhibit in the museum.

BEN NICHOLSON

32 Gun Museums & Collections in the USA