What happens to a weapons city if the weapons factory moves?

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

About ten years later, Remington moved its operation to just adjacent to the newly opened Erie Canal. Remington Arms became a force in Ilion, NY, west of Albany, producing weapons used by police, robbers, soldiers, and the public. But as generations passed, global competition and the economy undermined Remington's bottom line and its presence in the village, whose Main Street stops at the factory gates.

That road reached a dead end in late November when the private company announced it would move its remaining Ilion operations to Georgia, amid suggestions from business leaders — and some Republican elected officials — that New York's efforts to curb gun violence had driven away a loved one . local institution.

The move meant the loss of jobs for more than 300 employees, many of whom had been making guns by hand for decades and whose personal and civic identities were deeply tied to Remington. Ten years ago, Remington had more than 1,000 employees at the Ilion plant.

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

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

Ilion's assembly line, long famous for its shotguns and rifles, still produces hundreds of weapons a day despite slow workforce turnover. The shutdown is scheduled for March, and so has the New York Department of Labor retraining workers for other jobs.

In a statement on Facebook, company CEO Ken D'Arcy praised Ilion's staff but called Georgia “a state that supports and welcomes the firearms industry.”

“We are deeply saddened by the closure of this historic facility,” Mr. D'Arcy continued. “But maintaining and operating those very old buildings is prohibitively expensive. And the legislative environment in New York State remains a major concern for our industry.”

Shortly after the company informed employees of its plans, Rep. Elise Stefanik, whose district includes Ilion, blamed the state. “radical anti-Second Amendment policies,” including laws passed after the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting and the 2022 Buffalo supermarket massacre.

'The oldest arms manufacturer in the country has fled the state' said Mrs. Stefanikwho 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 workers at the plant, said the closure had little to do with gun laws.

“We've been manufacturing firearms for over 200 years and have never had a problem selling firearms,” said Mr. 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.”

Many in Ilion feel that this is simply the latest chapter in a long decline. “A lot of people have already absorbed that and gone to other places,” said Joseph D. Collea Jr., a former mayor. who wrote about Ilion's past.

But he also blamed the company for leaving the village. “It was a loyalty that went both ways, and it's long gone,” he said. “The business world is different now than it was in the early 1800s.”

Michael Helms, a firearms historian, said the company's presence in the market blossomed in the mid-19th century, when factories in New England and New York State became synonymous with gun manufacturing — the region was known as “Gun Valley,” similarly with Silicone. Valley at its peak.

“This was a very unique but peculiarly American phenomenon in the canon of global manufacturing,” Mr. Helms said. “And Remington was certainly part of that.”

But in recent years, those fortunes have gone wrong. Since 2013, Gun Valley mainstays such as Sturm, Ruger & Company, Smith & Wesson and OF Mossberg & Sons have all opened or expanded factories in Southern states, which typically offer a more gun-friendly political climate, non-union labor and tax incentives. saving companies millions in capital expenditures.

“They've migrated to Alabama, Kentucky, Tennessee, the Carolinas and Georgia,” said Michael Press, a consultant who helps companies find favorable tax deals in new locations and who has worked with Remington. “It's mainly about the cost of doing business.”

The Ilion factory was outdated (many of the structures are more than 100 years old) and required workers to move parts between buildings during production. Compared to this inefficient setup, a shiny, built-to-order space in Georgia had enormous appeal. Under the deal, Remington will pay just $10 for the land for its factory and enjoy up to $13 million in tax breaks, provided it meets construction and workforce benchmarks.

These sweeteners may have seemed particularly attractive given Remington's problems. Its finances became strained as it was transferred from one Wall Street owner to another, shrinking Ilion's workforce and often leaving 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 bought by another private equity firm, Cerberus Capital Management, which 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 such as free training for workers, free rental of factory space and a ten-year income tax cut.

But sales haven't kept pace: demand is driven in part by fears about gun control, and Donald J. Trump's presidential victory was, paradoxically, bad for business. Plagued by debt, Remington filed for bankruptcy protection in 2018 and again in 2020. When the company emerged from the restructuring, it still had a new owner: the investment company Roundhill Group.

And the money problems were not over yet. In 2022, Remington paid $73 million to settle a lawsuit over the Sandy Hook massacre, in which twenty 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 — which are long-term and unrelated to New York's recent gun control legislation — have undermined some of the political arguments surrounding Remington's withdrawal of the stake.

Betsy Briggs, co-chair of the Herkimer County Democratic Party, whose members are in the minority in this conservative county, noted that the plant “has struggled over the past 20 years.”

“There is a grieving process,” Ms Briggs said. “So many people grew up with their fathers or their uncles or their grandfathers, or all of the above, having a really good job” at Remington.

“Many houses in this area were built with Remington Arms salaries,” she said.

Located just off the New York State Thruway and on the banks of the Mohawk River, downtown Ilion is still dominated by Remington's low-slung brick buildings. A small museum that was part of the complex has closed, leaving inaccessible the remains of an industrial past that also produced typewriters, cutlery and other items.

Robert Smullen, a Republican lawmaker representing Ilion, said the departures were part of a larger trend, noting that other industrial operations in the state, including tanneries, had closed over the years, in part because they violated federal environmental regulations.

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

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

Still, residents like John McGraw say they worry about the impact on other businesses that once served thousands of workers, and the possibility that the hulking factory could remain empty.

“We have a huge hole in the middle of town and no one to fill it,” said Mr. McGraw, a former reporter who covered Remington for two local newspapers. “It's terrible.”

For his part, Mr. Brown, the union leader whose two daughters and his wife work at the factory, is angry, sad and uncertain about what will happen next. Until then, however, he and his fellow Remington long-timers will continue to clock in.

“There are those among us who will work,” he said, “until the end.”

a slogan on the company's website made it clear that the end was near.

“Revolutionizing a sector. Building a nation,” it says. “Remington Country is, was and always will be bigger than any place.”