Who is winchester owned by

By the s, Winchester was failing financially, having borrowed heavily in an attempt to finance the company's massive expansion during World War I. The Great Depression was no better; by , the company went into receivership. The company was saved by the Western Cartridge Company at a bankruptcy auction in , owned by the Olin family; the company was merged with the Western Cartridge Company and became known as Winchester-Western.

John Olin , first vice-president of the Western Cartridge Company, began operations to restore the company to its former glory shortly after he took his position. Come the s, it became clear to Winchester that it was no longer viable for them to produce their "classic" designs due to the increasing costs of skilled labor.

Then-employee Stefan Janson purportedly created a new design group in the company to design new products which would use then-modern techniques of gun production; this led to many of Winchester's "classic" designs such as the Model 12 to be discontinued. Winchester also attempted to diversify to other markets with little success. A large-scale strike in Winchester in the late s convinced Olin that firearms could no longer be produced profitably in New Haven.

The company sold the New Haven plant to its employees in , which incorporated itself as the U. Repeating Arms Company and given a license to produce Winchester arms. The U. Repeating Arms Company went defunct in , with the rights to the Winchester name first purchased by a French holding company and then by FN Herstal. The New Haven plant was closed on 31 March after years of producing arms and has since been converted into a residential area. The new technology included a spring-closed loading port on the right-hand side of the frame, directly at the rear of the magazine tube, and resulted in the first reliable lever-action repeating rifle, produced as the first Winchester, Model Manufacturing of the Model started in Bridgeport, Connecticut.

The Company also manufactured and licensed to the U. The U. With the plant's closure, the production of a celebrated line of rifles and shotguns known collectively as "the gun that won the West' officially ended.

Search this Guide Search. Repeating Arms factory in New Haven would soon close, capping years of Winchester manufacturing in the city. More than 19, Winchester employees worked in New Haven during World War II, but after years of a softening firearms market, the plant now employs fewer than All will lose their jobs when the plant closes. Officials and union leaders said they hoped someone would buy the plant and continue building the traditional rifles, but the Winchester name wouldn't necessarily come with the factory.

Such an arrangement would need to be worked out separately. Missouri-based Olin Corp. In the late s, after a massive strike by its machinists, Olin sold the plant to U. Repeating Arms along with the right to use the Winchester name until next year. Sauvage said the Herstal Group wants to extend that right past but Olin has not decided whether to allow it. Spokeswoman Ann Pipkin said Olin is disappointed with Herstal's decision to close the plant and may sell the Winchester naming rights to someone else.