MidwayUSA
American hunting and outdoor retailer
MidwayUSA is a family-owned American retailer of various hunting and outdoor-related products. The company is headquartered in Columbia, Missouri, and sells in the continental United States. The company markets online.
History
MidwayUSA, originally established as Ely Arms, Inc., began as a small firearms retailer in Columbia, Missouri, on June 18, 1977. It was established by Larry Potterfield, with initial co-ownership by his brother Jerry, in a 151 square metres (1,630 sq ft) metal, pole-frame building. Jerry later sold his interest in the company to Larry in 1980 and returned home to farm.
The mail-order division was started quite modestly later in 1977, with a small offering of ‘hand-made’ 8mm Japanese pistol ammunition and 25 Remington rifle ammunition. In 1980, Midway received the first shipment of what was to be a total production run of 500,000 rounds of 8mm Nambu brass, produced by B.E.L.L. Labs of Chicago. Much of this brass was loaded into ammunition and can still be found at gun shows in a bright orange box. The first press releases were under the name Ely Arms, Inc., which turned out to be in conflict with the Eley Division of Kynoch Industry; the term Eley was trademarked.
“MidwayUSA” enters the record as american hunting and outdoor retailer. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what MidwayUSA, American and hunting can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6843249. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1977 and 1980.
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This entry incorporates text from “MidwayUSA” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.