Winchester brought in his own gun mechanic, Benjamin Tyler Henry, who perfected a form of rimfire cartridge first dreamed up by Wesson and came up with an initial model capable of storing and firing 15 cartridges at a time. Winchester, a wealthy Connecticut businessman previously best known for manufacturing shirts, bought the Volcanic Repeating Arms Company in 1857. It had pioneered the first lever-action rifle with a design by Horace Smith and Daniel Wesson, who later made their fortune making Smith & Wesson handguns. The first is the place it holds in the history of the technology of firearms. It was Oliver Winchester’s good fortune to get into the firearms business at a time when industrial innovation was just beginning to take off in the United States, and the secession movement in the American South opened up hitherto undreamed-of commercial possibilities for anyone involved in armaments. The Winchester’s significance in American, and global, culture can really be divided into two phases. The plan, it seems, is to continue to use the Winchester name, but not in any way that will identify it with its traditional product line or the city of its origin.

The Winchester, a mournful New Haven mayor, John DeStefano, said a few days ago, “is part of who we are as a nation just like it’s part of who we are as a city” An era, in other words, is drawing to a close. The Belgians, in turn, did their best to push the Winchester in its last thriving markets – the gun collection trade in certain parts of western Europe – but the New Haven plant has been losing money for years. As one aficionado remarked at the time of the sale, if gun enthusiasts wanted to do business with the Belgians, they’d buy chocolates, not rifles. The past 30 years or so – particularly since a crippling strike by the company’s unionised machinists in the mid-1970s – have largely been a litany of humiliations; none more so than the sale of the US Repeating Arms Co to a Belgian holding company, the Herstal Group.

A factory that once boasted 19,000 employees now has fewer than 200. The company has long since given up any pretence of being at the cutting edge of firearms technology and, for several decades, has traded largely in memorabilia. Earlier this week, Winchester’s parent company, the US Repeating Arms Co, announced that it would close the New Haven plant for good at the end of March if a buyer could not be found. City officials and union leaders have vowed to hunt high and low for a saviour to avert the closure, but it is a daunting prospect. Two years after Wayne’s death in 1979, a commemorative Winchester was issued in his name and engraved with the name “Duke”, the sobriquet he carried with him throughout his 50-year career playing tough guys in the Old West Now, though, it seems the end has finally come. Well into the era of the Kalashnikov, the pump-action shotgun and the semi-automatic pistol, the Winchester brand continued to do business from its original New Haven headquarters.