Never one to miss a promotional opportunity, Winchester sent a special Henry rifle to President Lincoln. The rifle was the sixth ‘Henry’ ever produced and was plated in gold and intricately inscribed and personalised. Rifles were also sent to Secretary of War, Edwin McMasters Stanton, and Secretary of the Navy, Gideon Welles. In fact, it is a long-standing tradition that every standing President of the United States since has been presented with their own Winchester rifle. Despite these efforts, Winchester was only able to sell 1,731 models of the Henry rifle to the Union army. That’s not to say that the rifle wasn’t more heavily used by the soldiers of the North, but the capital for those guns had to come out of their own pockets. Word of mouth about the reliability and rapid-fire capability of the Henry rifle travelled fast through the ranks of the Union army, and soon soldiers who were earning limited incomes of around $13 a month were happy to spend their precious little money to purchase the $50 rifle. They would carry the weapon and purchase the ammunition on their own, anything to help better ensure a safe return home. The Henry rifle could be fired fourteen to fifteen times per minute, so a Union soldier would naturally want to take that into war against the Confederate soldiers, who were still often firing single-shot muskets. It is estimated that somewhere between six and seven thousand soldiers carried the Henry rifle into combat throughout the Civil War.
Winchester’s Henry rifle would prove itself during the Civil War, but it was during the westward migration of America that Winchester firearms would truly shine. In 1865 Oliver renamed his company the Winchester Arms Company, after a short stint as the Henry Repeating Rifle Company. The sales of the Henry rifle grew strong once the rifle had proven its worth, with sales reaching 13,000 units. The Henry was a great gun, but it had a few faults that Winchester wanted to improve upon. The barrel would often become hot enough to burn the user when the rifle had been fired in rapid succession. Also, the exposed magazine would allow dirt to clog the weapon and the ammunition wasn’t powerful enough for big game or long-range shooting. Winchester brought in a new superintendent for his factory, Nelson King, who would solve these defects by developing the Winchester Model 1866 rifle. The sales for the Model 1866 would skyrocket the company to success, selling over 170,000 units. The gun, dubbed the ‘Yellow Boy’ by the Native Americans due to its brass features, found fame during the 1876 Battle of Little Big Horn, also known as ‘Custer’s Last Stand’. The infamous battle-turned-massacre was largely a case of the American soldiers being outgunned by the combined force of the Lakota Sioux, Arapaho and Northern Cheyenne tribes. The United States 7th Cavalry was still armed with single shot weapons, despite the lessons learned during the Civil War. The Native American forces were, by contrast, armed with Winchester repeating rifles. To cut a long story short, the result was an overwhelming defeat of the Cavalry by the Native Americans; so devastating that it made the history books.
In 1873 Winchester released yet another rifle and this one was far more powerful. The Winchester Model 1873 saw the frame of the rifle change from brass to iron, and the addition of removable side panels, which made the gun easier to maintain without a complete disassembly. The ammunition was also far more powerful, with a revolutionary central fire round that included ⅓ more black powder. The amped-up ammunition allowed the gun to bring down a buffalo from 200yds away. The new gun was widely adopted by lawmen, in fact the Texas Rangers, who had previously used the Winchester Model 1866, upgraded to the new rifle and used it well into the twentieth century. President Theodore Roosevelt, who was an avid hunter, touted the Model 1873 as one of his favourite weapons in his memoirs.
The Winchester rifles continued production long after the west was won, and carved out a status as a cultural icon, as the weapon of choice for cowboys, ranchers, outlaws and lawmen. Despite the high level of success that their business ventures came to enjoy, the Winchester family seemed to have a bit of a curse in play. Oliver passed away on 11 December 1880, at the age of 70. He passed ownership of the company over to his son William, who would die only a few months later of tuberculosis, leaving behind a devastated and distraught widow Sarah, who would cast a dark cloud over the Winchester family name, one that lives on in legend to this day.
The exact date that Sarah Lockwood Pardee was born remains shrouded in mystery, much like the confusing legacy she left in her wake. What we do know is that she was born sometime around the year 1840 in New Haven, Connecticut, to Leonard and Sarah Pardee. It wasn’t until she met William Winchester, the son of Oliver Winchester, in her early twenties that Sarah’s life would become of public interest and be far more closely documented. William and Sarah married on 30 September 1862
The newlywed couple moved to a large stone house on Prospect Street in New Haven, very close to the Winchester factories. This was during the turbulent era of the Civil War (1861–1865). From the balcony on the back of her home, Sarah could see the factories where the arms were made. The war kept William quite busy with the Winchester Repeating Arms business and Sarah longed for the end of the war, because she understandably wanted more time with her new husband. The couple would have one child, a little girl named Annie Pardee Winchester, born on 15 June 1866. Tragically, baby Annie would only live a short time, dying on 24 July 1866.
The day that Annie was laid to rest, it is said that a terrible storm raged, complete with a dramatic tinge of thunder and lightning, as though Sarah’s emotions could almost govern the weather. Her grave read simply ‘Babie Annie’ and now lies next to her two parents in Evergreen Cemetery. Sarah and William’s infant daughter died of a condition known as marasmus, which was untreatable at the time. Modern medicine now associates marasmus with a protein deficiency known as kwashiorkor.
Tragedy would again strike the Winchester household fifteen years later, when William began to show signs of illness. He was working hard, nearly around the clock, so Sarah could have assumed that exhaustion and stress played a role in his wellbeing, but there was more to it than that. It took years of slowly wasting away, but William fell seriously ill and died on 7 March 1881. The legend goes that on the day of his funeral, there was thunder and lightning in the sky yet again.
Sarah was left alone in a large, cold, dark home overlooking the Winchester factories where her husband spent a good portion of their married life, and which she may very well have blamed for his eventual death. They stood like grisly beacons, continuing to make instruments of death on a daily basis. Sarah Winchester would be the sole heiress to her husband’s full estate, a fact that would leave her wealthy beyond the wildest dreams of most, but Sarah was so haunted by the death of her family that she couldn’t enjoy it.
The legend goes that Sarah, obsessed with death and desperately seeking contact with her deceased husband, fell into company with a medium from Boston named Adam Coons. It is also said that she had an interest in the occult and believed that she could communicate with the dead through Coons. In 1884 she placed an urn on the graves of William and Annie that said: ‘Hearts are dust. Heart’s love remains. To live in the hearts we leave behind is not to die.’
Legend further tells us that Coons helped Sarah establish total communication with William in the afterlife. Hoping for words of love, she was disappointed by a gloomy and dark message from the tortured spirit of her husband. William’s ghost told Sarah that she would be forever haunted by the spirits of those killed by the Winchester rifle. The spirits had also decreed that the Winchester family needed to provide them with a final resting place. William then told her to build a house that would never be completed, with infinite rooms that would provide shelter for the spirits. Sarah believed that by doing this she would gain immortality. This is the legend, and the basis for much of the thought about the motivations of Sarah Winchester and her ‘mad’ mystery home. How much of this is actually true? Surprisingly little, it turns out.