What Happens to a Gun Town When the Weapons Factory Moves Out?

Eliphalet Remington built his first rifle barrel more than 200 years ago, painstakingly crafting it in his father’s forge in upstate New York. At that point, ammunition was round, the British were the bad guys and gun control involved forearm strength.

About a decade later, Remington moved his operation to just beside the newly opened Erie Canal. Remington Arms became a force in Ilion, New York, west of Albany, producing weapons used by cops, robbers, soldiers and the public. But as generations passed, global competition and economics eroded Remington’s bottom line and its presence in the village, whose Main Street stops at its factory gates.

That road reached a dead end in late November when the privately held company announced it would relocate its remaining Ilion operations to Georgia, amid suggestions from company leaders — and some Republican elected officials — that New York’s efforts to stem gun violence had driven away a beloved local institution.

The move meant the loss of jobs for more than 300 employees, many of whom had made guns by hand for decades, and whose personal and civic identity was deeply tied to Remington. A decade ago, Remington had more than 1,000 employees at the Ilion factory.

“Two hundred and eight years of history. Gone, gone,” said John P. Stephens, the village’s mayor, adding, “Ilion is Remington. Remington is Ilion.”

Stephens, whose father worked at Remington for 37 years, added: “The history and the nostalgic loss that we’re going to suffer is almost, if not bigger than, the financial loss.”

Long famed for its shotguns and rifles, the Ilion assembly line still produces hundreds of guns a day despite slow employee attrition. The closing is scheduled for March, and the New York Department of Labor has been retraining employees for other jobs.

In a statement on Facebook, Remington CEO Ken D’Arcy praised the Ilion workforce, but called Georgia “a state that supports and welcomes the firearms industry.”

“We are deeply saddened by the closing of this historic facility,” D’Arcy continued. “But maintaining and operating those very old buildings is cost prohibitive. And New York state’s legislative environment remains a major concern for our industry.”

Shortly after the company informed employees of its plans, Rep. Elise Stefanik, whose district encompasses Ilion, blamed the state’s “radical anti-Second Amendment policies,” including laws passed after the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Connecticut and the 2022 massacre at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York.

“The oldest gun manufacturer in the country has been run out of the state,” said Stefanik, who has missed few opportunities to attack New York’s ruling Democrats.

But Frank Brown, president of Local 717 of the United Mine Workers of America, which represents the plant’s workers, said that the closing had little to do with gun laws.

“We have been manufacturing firearms for over 200 years and have never, ever had a problem selling firearms,” said Brown, 59, who goes by “Rusty” and has worked on the factory’s furnaces for nearly 30 years. He added, “It’s all about money and greed.”

Indeed, the sense among many in Ilion is that this is simply the final chapter in a long decline. “A lot of people have absorbed that already and gone to other places,” said Joseph Collea Jr., a former mayor who has written about Ilion’s past.

But he also faulted the company for abandoning the village. “It was a loyalty going both ways, and that is long since gone,” he said. “The corporate world is different now than it was at the turn of the 19th century.”

Michael Helms, a firearms historian, said Remington’s presence in the marketplace blossomed in the mid-1800s, when plants in New England and upstate New York became synonymous with gun production — the region was known as “Gun Valley,” not unlike Silicon Valley in its prime.

“This was a very unique but peculiar American phenomenon in the canon of world manufacturing,” Helms said. “And Remington was definitely a part of that.”

But in recent years, those fortunes have gone foul. Since 2013, Gun Valley mainstays such as Sturm, Ruger & Co., Smith & Wesson and O.F. Mossberg & Sons have all opened or expanded factories in Southern states, which typically offer a more gun-friendly political climate, nonunion labor and tax-incentive packages that save companies millions in capital expenses.

“They have migrated to Alabama, Kentucky, Tennessee, the Carolinas and Georgia,” said Michael Press, a consultant who helps companies find advantageous tax deals on new sites and who has worked with Remington. “It’s mainly about the cost of doing business.”

The Ilion factory was outdated — many of its structures are more than 100 years old — and required workers to move parts between buildings during production. Compared with this inefficient setup, a gleaming built-to-order space in Georgia held enormous appeal. Under the deal, Remington will pay only $10 for the land for its factory, and enjoy up to $13 million in tax credits, provided it hits construction and staffing bench marks.

These sweeteners may have seemed especially attractive given Remington’s troubles. Its finances had become strained as it was passed from one Wall Street owner to the next, shrinking the Ilion workforce and often landing the company in the red.

In 1993, Clayton, Dubilier & Rice, a New York private equity firm, bought Remington for $300 million from DuPont, which had owned it since the Great Depression. In 2007, it was purchased by another private equity firm, Cerberus Capital Management, which had planned to use Remington to create a “roll-up” — a conglomerate — of gun and ammunition makers. Cerberus paid $118 million in cash and assumed $252 million of Remington’s debt.

The new owners opened a factory in Huntsville, Alabama, lured by incentives that included free training for employees, free rent on a factory space and a 10-year income tax abatement.

But sales couldn’t keep pace: Demand is driven partly by fear of gun control, and Donald Trump’s presidential victory was, paradoxically, bad for business. Pummeled by debt, Remington filed for bankruptcy protection in 2018 and again in 2020. When it emerged from restructuring, it had yet another new owner, investment firm Roundhill Group.

And the money woes weren’t over. In 2022, Remington paid $73 million to settle a lawsuit over the Sandy Hook massacre, in which 20 first graders and six adults were killed by a disturbed young man using an AR-15-style rifle manufactured by the company.

Such financial realities — long-term and unrelated to recent New York gun-control legislation — have undercut some of the political arguments surrounding Remington’s pulling up stakes.

Betsy Briggs, a co-chair of the Herkimer County Democratic Party, whose members are outnumbered in this conservative county, noted that the factory “has struggled for the last 20 years.”

“There’s a grief process,” Briggs said. “So many people grew up with their fathers or their uncles or their grandpas, or all the above, having really good jobs” at Remington.

“Many homes in this area were built through the salaries of Remington Arms,” she said.

The center of Ilion, which sits just off the New York State Thruway and on the banks of the Mohawk River, is still dominated by Remington’s low-slung brick buildings. A small museum that was part of the complex is closed, making inaccessible the relics of an industrial past that also included making typewriters, cutlery and other items.

Robert Smullen, a Republican who represents Ilion in the state Assembly, said that the departure was part of a larger trend, noting that other upstate industrial operations, including tanneries, had closed over the years, in part because they fell afoul of federal environmental regulations.

Asked whether he thought the state’s gun laws had contributed to the factory’s decline, Smullen was circumspect, saying they “didn’t encourage people to do this sort of business, this sort of work, in New York state.”

But he added that the people of Ilion were resilient. “I think this is going to be like the phoenix rising from the ashes,” he said.

Still, residents such as John McGraw say they worry about the impact on other businesses that once served thousands of employees, as well as the possibility that the hulking plant could remain vacant.

“We have a giant hole in the middle of the town, and there’s no one to fill it,” said McGraw, a former reporter who covered Remington for two local papers. “It’s awful.”

For his part, Brown, the union leader whose two daughters and wife work at the plant, is angry, sad and unsure what will come next. Until then, however, he and his fellow Remington longtimers will continue to clock in.

“There’s ones of us that will work,” he said, “till the end.”

A slogan on the company’s website made clear that the end was near.

“Revolutionizing an industry. Building a nation,” it reads. “Remington Country is, was and always will be bigger than any one place.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .