Today we drove about 40 miles west of here to Springfield Massachusetts to visit the Springfield Armory. This historic place was established by George Washington in 1794 as our Nation's first armory. In 1968 it was closed as an armory because the government felt we had adequate commercial firearms manufacturing capabilities in the United States. In 1960 it was designated as a National Landmark but it was not until six years after it closed, in 1974, that the armory was opened as a National Historic Site managed by the National Park Service to include the historic grounds, the buildings and the world's largest historic American military firearms collection.
Understanding our Nation's history is very important to Doreen and I. As we travel around the United States we love to stop at museums and all sorts of historic sites such as battlefields and other places. Couple that with my sincere appreciation for old military firearms and a stop at the Springfield Armory was a must.
As mentioned above, this place is really old! In 1793 General George Washington said, "If we are to secure peace one of the most powerful instruments of our rising prosperity it must be known that we are at all times ready for war." In 1794 the new federal government decided to manufacture it's own muskets so our nation would not have to be dependent on foreign arms manufacturers. President Washington selected two sites: Harper's Ferry Virginia and Springfield Massachusetts. The Harper's Ferry location operated until the beginning of the Civil War when it was destroyed to minimize the south's industrial capabilities. So here we are at Springfield today!
The other historic aspect of the Springfield Armory is the evolution from building, piece by piece, one musket at a time into the world's premier firearms mass-production center with precision parts that could be reliably interchanged as needed. Sound familiar? Welcome to American ingenuity!
The iconic building here at the Armory is the visitor center and museum. This is where we stopped today. Inside are all sorts of displays and the world's largest collection of historic American military firearms.
Various other historic buildings on the campus
Quarters 1, built in 1847 and was where the Armory commanding officers
and their families lived until 1967.
We entered the museum and were immediately greeted by a friendly National Park Service ranger. A movie was just starting so we watched it and then toured the museum. Doreen was not sure the battery in the phone (camera) was going to hold up! I took a ton of pictures but will try to throttle my enthusiasm here. There were displays of literally hundreds of years of military firearms. From muskets to the M16A1. Bayonets. World War I and World War II firearms including those of our allies.
The engineering. The ingenuity. The craftsmanship. Absolutely amazing. Here is an example I found very interesting. So there were woodworkers creating rifle stocks from slabs of wood. Cutting, carving and crafting an irregular-shaped gun stock. How would they ever be able to consistently mass-produce them? Well, in 1819 one of the Armory employees Thomas Blanchard created a machine! A special lathe that uses a pattern to carve an identical item. American ingenuity! You've seen this before - a key cutting machine.
I saw many weapons that I own or have owned, including the 30-40 Krag bolt action rifle, the M1 Carbine, the M1911A1 pistol and the M16A1 rifle we qualified with in the Air Force.
One of the most iconic weapons here at the Springfield Armory is the M1 Garand, developed by John C. Garand, a civilian engineer employed here at the Springfield Armory. The Garand was the first semiautomatic military rifle used as a standard combat shoulder weapon. It was the basic U.S. infantry weapon in both World War II and the Korean War. As I mentioned last night in the blog, General George Patton called the M1 Garand, “The greatest battle implement ever devised.” Here in the museum they have many M1 Garands including several created during development.
Various developmental variants of the M1 Garand
Serial number 1, Garand's completed design, much of it hand-made.
The first 80 rifles were to some extent hand-made.
Serial number 81 - significant as this was the first
completely machine-made M1 Garand
Serial number 1,000,000
Serial number 2,000,000
Serial number 3,000,000
Serial number 6,084,405 - the very last assembly line M1 built in May 1957
Following Pearl Harbor, both Springfield and Winchester operated around the clock, producing more than 4,000,000 M1 rifles by the end of the war in 1945. As seen above, over 6,000,000 were produced.
Following the M1 Garand, the M14 rifle was the last shoulder weapon produced at the Springfield Armory. In 1964, the M16 entered US military service and in the following year was deployed for jungle warfare operations during the Vietnam War. In 1969, the M16A1 replaced the M14 rifle to become the US military's standard service rifle.
Here are a couple more production pictures that are interesting. The top one illustrates how power was distributed via an overhead shaft and belts to the machines. They described the evolution from hand work to water power to steam power and finally electric power. The water power phase drove the location of the production facilities here in Springfield.
These pictures show "Organ of Muskets", the subject of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem from protesting the wanton waste of war that was written after a visit to Springfield Armory in 1843.
I thoroughly enjoyed our visit there today and could have spent much more time there, but we noticed some severe traffic issues on eastbound I-90 as we traveled west to Springfield, so we headed back. We did a drive-by on the Dr. Seuss National Memorial Sculpture Garden while heading back to the campground.
This afternoon we watched our grandson's baseball games, did a walk about the campground and worked on a turn signal issue that developed on the big ol' brown truck. Tomorrow is yet to be determined.
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