Twain Visits Colt Factory

Mark Twain, who lived in Hartford, CT, from 1871 until 1891, was fascinated by the Colt Patent Fire-Arms factory. When he visited the armory in 1868, he wrote this admiring account:

"It [Colt armory] comprises a great range of tall brick buildings, and on every floor is a dense wilderness of strange iron machines . a tangled forest of rods, bars, pulleys, wheels, and all the imaginable and unimaginable forms of mechanism . It must have required more brains to invent all those things than would serve to stock 50 Senates like ours."