Remington: The Good Stuff
The news about Remington’s financial woes has produced the usual discussions in gun forums about what went wrong, with people discussing when their products supposedly turned to junk and “if they just had done X” and so on.
This isn’t about that at all. Remington in various corporate forms has, I believe, been the longest continuously operating gun maker in America since E. Remington and Sons set up shop in Ilion, New York, in 1816. That makes them an important part of American history.
They introduced a lot of almost legendary guns over the centuries. The only modern shotgun I ever owned was a magnum-receiver Model 870 I bought decades ago at a Bi-Mart or K-Mart (exact memory fails) for 199 bucks. Over time, I added an 18-inch police barrel and a 20-inch deer barrel with sights, and that served all my life’s shotgunning needs.
What I’ve got left in my collection now is a Remington 51 in .380. By the time John Pedersen’s gun hit the market in the later 19-teens, the competition from Colt and Savage was well-established and less expensive, so it didn’t do that well.
But in terms of the grip and handling, it’s my favorite among the early-20th-century pocket pistols. The Remington 51 is also notable in that it is the only pistol of the time where the .380 came before the .32 and vastly outsold the latter. On the other brands, the Colt 1903/1908 Pocket Hammerless and the Savage 1907/1915/1917 series, the .32 outsold the .380 by a factor of 4 or more.
These guns nowadays tend to be in bad shape or expensive safe queens with box and stuff. It took me a while a few years ago to find this one, with minor cosmetic issues and some corrosive splots, for around 300.
Remington has never done history letters, but extrapolating from the serial and some research in various sources appears to place production of this gun in mid-1920.
Feel free to add any older or newer Remingtons you have.
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