Two men, a smith and his son, both named Eliphalet Remington, in 1816, were working busily one day at their forge in beautiful Ilion Gorge, when, so tradition says, the son asked his father for money to buy a rifle, and met with a refusal.

The boy set his wits to work. Looking around the forge, he picked up enough scrap iron to make a gun barrel, and with this set to work to make a rifle for himself. At that time gun barrels were made, not by drilling the bore out of a solid rod of metal, but by shaping a thick, oblong sheet of metal around a rod the size of the bore, and lapwelding the edges. When the rod was withdrawn, there was your barrel.

It took him several weeks to work out this job and get it right, but he succeeded. He had no tools to cut the rifling. There was a gunsmith in Utica, and he walked there, fifteen miles over the hills, to have his barrel finished. The gunsmith was so impressed by the boy and his accomplishment that, after rifling the barrel, he fitted it with a lock. Then when Remington fitted on a wooden stock his weapon was ready.

This was the first Remington rifle, and it proved a surprisingly good one.

Neighbors tried it, and wanted guns like it. Remington made them. The first rifle - or one exactly like the first one, at least - that Remington made is still in Ilion, the property of Walter Green. Before long the demand was so brisk that Remington would take as many barrels as he could carry over to the Utica gunsmith to be rifled, bringing back a load that had been left there on a previous trip, a journey of thirty miles on foot.

When a new business grows at that rate, of course, it soon needs power. So, later, in 1816, the two Remingtons went "up the creek," building a shop three miles from home, at Ilion Gulph, which was part of the father's farm. That was the actual beginning of the plant and the industry of which the centennial was celebrated in 1916. During its early years this shop made anything in its line that could be sold in the neighborhood - rifles, shotguns, crowbars, pickaxes, farm tools. The power was taken from a water wheel in Steele's Creek, and the first grindstones for smoothing down the welded edges in gun barrels were cut from a red sandstone ledge up the gorge.

Guns sold better than all other products. Orders came from greater distances. By and by shipments were made on the new Erie Canal. For a while, as packages were small, they were taken to the canal bridge, a board lifted from the floor, and the package dropped onto a boat as it passed under. There was no bill of lading. Remington took down the name of the boat and notified his customer by mail, so the latter would know which craft was bringing his guns.

When the trade had extended into all the surrounding counties, however, the new business needed another prime essential of industry - transportation facilities. Shipments were growing larger, and materials like grindstones, bought outside, had to be brought from the canal to Ilion Gulph. In 1828, therefore, the elder Remington bought a large farm in Ilion proper, and there, on the canal, the present plant was started. This was also the beginning of Ilion, for at that period the place was nothing more than a country corner. In 1828 the elder Remington met his death through accident. and the business was carried on by his son, who brought water for several power wheels from Steele's Creek, built a house to live in, and installed in his wooden shop quite a collection of machinery for gunmaking - the list names a big tilt hammer, several trip hammers, boring and rifling machines, grindstones, and so on.

Young Remington at Work on Rifle.