The barrel from the forge
The story every Ilion kid learns: in 1816, young Eliphalet Remington II forged a rifle barrel at his father's forge on Staley Creek and walked it to a Utica gunsmith to be rifled — and the finished gun shot so well that neighbors lined up with orders. Like most origin stories it has grown smooth with handling (see the fact notes), but the business it describes was real: the family works moved beside the Erie Canal at Ilion in the late 1820s, and E. Remington & Sons had the nation for a market.1
The company armed the Union in the Civil War — including more than 12,000 contract rifles — and became one of the world's great arms makers.2 Then it did something stranger: in 1873 it began manufacturing the Sholes & Glidden Type-Writer — the first commercially successful typewriter, the machine that standardized the QWERTY keyboard.3 For a while, the future of both the office and the battlefield was being built on the same street in Ilion.
Typewriters, Rand and the long goodbye
The typewriter side spun off and, through mergers, became Remington Rand in 1927 — the business-machines giant that went on to deliver UNIVAC I, the first successful civilian computer, in 1951.45 The arms side stayed put: through wars, ownership changes and bankruptcies, rifles came off Ilion lines for nearly two centuries.7
The end came recently: after Remington's 2020 bankruptcy and sale, the successor company closed the Ilion plant in March 2024, moving production to Georgia and ending roughly 300 jobs.6 The village is now working out what comes next for the sprawling plant — while the Remington name remains, for machine collectors and historians worldwide, a synonym for this one small Valley village.