The Gun Dynasties That Armed America (Documentary)

In this video, we explore the families who grew rich arming America, from a French refugee's gunpowder mill on the Brandywine to a widow in a black mourning dress who ran the largest private armory in the country: the du Ponts, whose wartime profits made them the most famous of the so-called merchants of death; the Remingtons, who built one empire in guns and another in typewriters and lost them both; the Colts of Hartford; and the du Pont cousins whose courtroom war split the dynasty. ------------------- Gain FREE access to secret full-length documentaries on wealthy families "too scandalous for YouTube" by joining our newsletter: https://www.substack.com/@oldmoneyluxury ------------------- The story begins in 1802, when Eleuthere Irenee du Pont, a young French immigrant who had learned powder-making in France, began building a gunpowder mill on the Brandywine River near Wilmington, Delaware. With help from Thomas Jefferson's government, the du Pont mills became a major supplier to the American military, and during the War of 1812 the company sold the United States hundreds of thousands of pounds of powder. Over the next century the family supplied powder for the Mexican War, the Civil War and the Spanish-American War. Then came the First World War. DuPont produced an estimated 40 percent of the explosives used by the Allies, and by one account its stock rose from 20 dollars to 1,000 dollars a share. In 1934 a bestselling book called Merchants of Death and a Senate investigation led by Gerald Nye put the family's war profits on trial in public, with Pierre du Pont and his brothers called to testify. The second dynasty grew up in the Mohawk Valley of New York. In 1816, a 23-year-old named Eliphalet Remington entered a shooting match with a flintlock rifle he had built himself. He finished second, but the rifle impressed the other contestants, the orders followed, and in 1828 he moved his forge to Ilion, where E. Remington and Sons became one of the great arms makers of the nineteenth century. His sons pushed the company far beyond guns, into sewing machines, farm tools and bicycles. In 1873 Philo Remington signed a contract to manufacture the typewriter invented by Christopher Latham Sholes, and Remington produced the first commercially successful typewriter, the machine that introduced the QWERTY keyboard. But sales could not make up for falling demand for firearms. In 1886 the family sold the typewriter business to three of its own salesmen, Wyckoff, Seamans and Benedict, and the company went into receivership. On March 7, 1888, the gun company itself passed out of Remington hands, and Philo Remington died the following year. The third dynasty was built in Hartford, Connecticut. Samuel Colt, a storekeeper's son, whittled a wooden revolver on a voyage to India, toured the country as the laughing-gas showman Dr. Coult to pay for prototypes, and received his first American revolver patent in 1836. His first company failed, but a battlefield victory by the Texas Rangers and an Army order for one thousand Walker Colts brought him back, and by 1855 his armory under a blue onion dome dominated the Connecticut River. When Samuel died in January 1862, aged 47, his widow Elizabeth inherited control of the company. She had already lost three children and would bury all five, but she insured the armory against fire, which her husband had refused to do. When it burned in February 1864, the insurance helped keep the company alive, and she rebuilt the dome. Under her ownership Colt produced the Single Action Army revolver, the Peacemaker of the American West, and she controlled the business for 39 years before selling it in 1901. When she died in 1905, the Hartford Courant called her the First Lady of Connecticut. The final chapter returns to the du Ponts. In 1902 three cousins, Alfred I., T. Coleman and Pierre S. du Pont, bought the family company to stop it being sold off. But in February 1915, as wartime contracts sent the shares soaring, Pierre and a group of associates bought Coleman's huge block of stock for themselves. Alfred, who had helped save the company in 1902, believed the company should have had the right to buy, and in December 1915 he sued his cousin for breach of trust. The case made headlines throughout 1916, ended in Pierre's favor, and left the family divided for good. The central question is whether these families simply supplied a nation at war, or whether fortunes made from gunpowder and revolvers always carried a price for the people who inherited them. This is the story of the du Ponts, the Remingtons and the Colts, the gun dynasties that armed America, and what the business of war cost each of them. #GunHistory #DuPont #OldMoneyDocumentaries