The Colt Family: When America Was Armed By A Woman (Documentary)

For 39 years, from the Civil War to the dawn of the twentieth century, the largest private arms manufacturer on earth was controlled by a woman in a black mourning dress. Her name was Elizabeth Hart Jarvis Colt, and the company she ran from 1862 to 1901, from a hilltop mansion overlooking the Connecticut River in Hartford, produced the revolvers that armed the Union Army, the Peacemaker that settled the American West, and the factory relationships that gave birth to the M1911 semi-automatic pistol, which served as America's standard sidearm through two world wars, Korea, Vietnam, and 74 consecutive years of military service. The company bore her husband's name. Samuel Colt had invented the revolver, built the armory, and died at 47 of gout, leaving behind a 35-year-old widow, a one-year-old daughter, a company running at full wartime production tempo, and an estate valued at roughly $3.5 million in 1862 currency. Elizabeth buried her husband, then buried four of her five children, then ran the company for four decades, then sold it, then donated an art collection, a park, and a mansion to the city of Hartford, and then died at Newport, Rhode Island, in August of 1905. The Hartford Courant devoted its entire front page to her obituary and called her the First Lady of Connecticut. In this in-depth, full-length documentary, we explore the century-long arc of the Colt firearms dynasty — from a Hartford storekeeper's son who whittled a revolver prototype from scrap wood aboard a sailing ship to India, through the failed Paterson plant of 1836, through the Walker's Creek revolver contract that revived him, through the blue-domed Coltsville armory beside the Connecticut River, to the 35-year-old widow who ran the company for 39 years and gave America the Peacemaker, the M1911, and the factory template that would define American manufacturing from sewing machines to automobiles. ---------------------------------------- Gain FREE access to secret full-length documentaries on wealthy families "too scandalous for YouTube" by joining our newsletter: https://www.substack.com/@oldmoneyluxury ---------------------------------------- We open in Hartford, Connecticut on July 19, 1814 — the birth of Samuel Colt, the son of a storekeeper and a mother whose Caldwell family sat at the top of the city's mercantile elite, the 1820 death of his mother of tuberculosis, the death of his sister Margaret of the same disease, and the 1829 arsenic suicide of his sister Sarah Ann that closed his childhood on a house of six graves before the boy had finished his fourteenth year. We follow the young Colt to sea in 1830 — the merchant brig Corvo sailing from Boston to Calcutta, the 15-year-old apprentice sailor whittling a wooden revolver prototype from scrap on the deck watch as he studied the rotating ship's wheel and the pawl-and-detent locking system of the wooden capstan, and the mechanical principle that would within seven years become the first American revolver patent. We reconstruct the early failed years — the 1832 patent-medicine tour as Dr. Coult of Calcutta lecturing on laughing gas across the American east coast, the 1836 revolver patent, the founding of the Patent Arms Manufacturing Company at Paterson, New Jersey, the small production run of five-shot revolvers ordered by the Republic of Texas, and the 1842 bankruptcy of the Paterson factory that closed the operating company and left Colt without capital. We trace the recovery through Walker's Creek — the June 8, 1844 engagement in which 15 Texas Rangers under Captain John Coffee Hays used Paterson revolvers to defeat 80 Comanche warriors, the 1846 recommendation letter from Captain Samuel H. Walker that led to the 1,000-pistol Walker Colt contract for the Mexican-American War, the Whitneyville production run at Eli Whitney's Connecticut armory, and the moment a bankrupt inventor found a wartime buyer and a proven battlefield reputation in a single order. We follow the 1848 founding of the Colt's Patent Fire-Arms Manufacturing Company at Hartford — the four-story armory at Pearl Street, the vertical integration of forging, boring, chambering, and rifling under a single roof, the manufacturing partnership with Elisha King Root, and the 1855 relocation of the operation to the South Meadows floodplain of the Connecticut River, where Samuel Colt built the largest private armory in the world beneath a blue onion dome patterned on a Russian orthodox church he had visited during a European sales tour. We reconstruct the 1856 wedding — Samuel Colt's marriage to Elizabeth Hart Jarvis, the 30-year-old daughter of an Episcopal rector from Middletown, Connecticut, the honeymoon tour of Europe conducted as an armorer's diplomatic mission across the courts of Russia, Prussia, and Austria, and the Armsmear mansion Elizabeth designed above the South Meadows with an art gallery, a conservatory, and a private chapel already planned into the working drawings.