Benjamin Tyler Henry and the 1860: How the Lever Gun Was Born

A foreman in Vermont

Benjamin Tyler Henry was born on March 22, 1821, in Claremont, New Hampshire. He apprenticed to a gunsmith as a young man and worked his way up to shop foreman at the Robbins & Lawrence Arms Company in Windsor, Vermont.

In that shop he crossed paths with two men whose names would end up on a very different kind of gun: Horace Smith and Daniel B. Wesson. Together they worked on the "Volitional Repeater," a descendant of Walter Hunt's 1848 design, which used a 12-round tube magazine under the barrel. The idea of a tube-fed repeater was there. Making it practical would take more than a decade.

The Volcanic disaster

In 1854, Smith and Wesson formed a partnership and developed a lever-action pistol and a new "Volcanic" cartridge. In 1855 the business became the Volcanic Repeating Arms Company, with new investors. The largest stockholder among them was Oliver Winchester.

The company struggled. Winchester forced the company into insolvency in late 1856, bought its assets with a partner, and in April 1857 reorganized it in New Haven as the New Haven Arms Company. He hired Benjamin Tyler Henry as plant superintendent.

Henry had the job of turning a failed product into something soldiers and hunters would buy.

The patent of October 16, 1860

Henry's solution was to fix the cartridge first. He developed a .44-caliber rimfire round with a 216-grain bullet over roughly 25 to 28 grains of black powder, in a copper, later brass, case. It was a modest cartridge by rifle standards, but it was a self-contained metallic round that could feed reliably from a magazine.

Around it, after about three years of work, he designed a rifle. On October 16, 1860, Henry received a patent for his .44-caliber repeating rifle.

The design was elegantly simple:

• A tubular magazine under the barrel held 15 cartridges, often counted as 16 with one in the chamber.
• Working the lever extracted the fired case, cocked the hammer and fed a fresh round from the magazine into the chamber.
• The magazine was loaded from the front, near the muzzle, rather than through the receiver. That made reloading slow, a problem Winchester would solve later.

The rifle weighed about 9 pounds 4 ounces, with a 24-inch barrel and an overall length of nearly 45 inches. It had no wooden forearm; your support hand gripped the barrel and magazine. Henry Repeating Arms' history page today describes the original as "the first practical, lever action repeating rifle."

Into the Civil War

Production was slow at first. The first Henry rifles did not reach Union soldiers until mid-1862. About 900 were made between that summer and October 1862; by 1864, output peaked around 290 a month.

The government's own purchases were small. The U.S. bought 1,731 standard Henrys during the war, and Kentucky bought 50 more. The real demand came from soldiers. Over 10,000 Henrys are believed to have seen service, many bought privately by men who wanted the firepower. The unit cost was about 40 dollars in period money, and Lorain Ruggles of the 20th Ohio is recorded as buying one privately for 65, a serious sum for a soldier.

Henrys were favored by scouts, skirmishers, flank guards and raiders: men who might be outnumbered and needed many shots before reloading. Two Henry-armed Union regiments performed well at the Battle of Franklin, and at Allatoona Pass, Major William Ludlow wrote about a company of men with what the Henry company history page calls "16-shooters."

The rifle's reputation reached the other side, too. Confederate cavalry commander John Mosby is credited with calling it "that damned Yankee rifle" that could be loaded on Sunday and fired all week. Some Confederate units in Louisiana, Texas and Virginia also used captured Henrys, as did Jefferson Davis's bodyguards.

The quarrel that renamed the rifle

By 1864, the Henry rifle was famous and Benjamin Henry was angry. He believed he was badly underpaid for his invention. While Oliver Winchester was in Europe, Henry petitioned the Connecticut legislature to award him ownership of the New Haven Arms Company.

Winchester came home and stopped it. He reorganized the company as the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, and in 1866 it released a much-improved version of Henry's rifle. The Model 1866 kept the .44 rimfire cartridge, added a wooden forearm, and solved the Henry's slow front-loading magazine with a loading gate on the right side of the receiver, invented by Winchester employee Nelson King. Because of its brass frame, it became known as the "Yellow Boy."

Henry left the company. He worked as an independent gunsmith until his death on June 8, 1898, at age 77. The rifle that bore his name had made Oliver Winchester's name a byword for repeating rifles. About 14,000 Henrys had been made by the end of production in 1866.

Battlefields after the war

The Henry did not vanish with the Union armies. Lakota, Dakota, Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho fighters used it extensively at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876, against soldiers carrying single-shot Springfield carbines. Forces loyal to Benito Juárez obtained some during the war against the French in Mexico. The rifle had become an international symbol of the repeating firearm.

The second Henry

Fast forward to 1996. In Brooklyn, a father and son, Louis and Anthony Imperato, secured the Henry trademark and founded Henry Repeating Arms. Their first product, the H001 Classic .22 lever action, shipped in March 1997. The company grew rapidly, expanding into Rice Lake, Wisconsin in 2006 and later Bayonne, New Jersey; by 2013 it reported shipping 300,000 rifles with 300 employees, and it now employs more than 800 people.

It is worth being clear: modern Henry Repeating Arms has no direct corporate connection to Benjamin Tyler Henry or the New Haven Arms Company. It chose the name for its heritage.

But it has paid homage. Henry builds a modernized Model 1860 with a brass receiver, American walnut stock, and modern steel barrel and internals, chambered not for the obsolete .44 Henry rimfire but for .44-40 Winchester. Italy's Uberti makes a near-exact copy in .44-40 or .45 Colt as well. The site's Henry lineup decoder explains where the Original fits in the modern catalog.

Henry also offers an Original Iron Frame version with a case-hardened receiver for those who prefer steel to brass.

Myth vs fact

Shooting one today

Modern 1860 reproductions are built for modern factory .44-40 or .45 Colt loads. Like the original, they use a tubular magazine, so stick to flat-nose or round-nose lead bullets. The .44-40 Winchester ammo selection is the place to start.

Why the 1860 still matters

Every lever gun on a rack today, from a Marlin 336 to a Henry X Model, owes something to the rifle Benjamin Henry patented in 1860. He solved the cartridge problem that had sunk Hunt's and Volcanic's designs, built a fast, reliable repeating mechanism around it, and proved in the hardest conditions imaginable that a soldier with a repeater could hold off far more men.

He did not get the fortune. He did not keep the company. His name, though, ended up on more rifles in the twenty-first century than it did in the nineteenth. That may be the best revenge a gunsmith ever got.

Editorial note: This is an independent editorial overview built from manufacturer specifications, retailer listings and published sources. We have not performed hands-on testing of the products discussed, and nothing here is a performance guarantee. Verify specifications, compatibility and the law where you live.

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