Stevens Arms
American firearms maker
Stevens Arms is an American firearms manufacturer founded by Joshua Stevens in 1864 in Chicopee, Massachusetts. The company introduced the .22 Long Rifle round and made a number of rifle, shotgun, and target pistol designs. By 1902, they were advertising themselves as "the largest producers of sporting arms in the world". They were purchased by New England Westinghouse on May 28, 1915, and again by Savage Arms on April 1, 1920. As a division of Savage, Stevens continued to produce firearms at their Chicopee Falls facility until 1960 when the plant was torn down and Stevens production was moved into other Savage facilities. Savage dropped the Stevens name in 1991, but revived it in 1999 and still uses it today for a number of its low cost rifles and shotguns.
History
Stevens Arms was founded by Joshua Stevens with help from backers W.B. Fay and James Taylor in Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts, in 1864 as J. Stevens & Co. Their earliest product was a tip-up action single shot pistol.
Business was slow in 1870 when Stevens occupied a converted grist mill and had just sixty employees. The Panic of 1873 had a further negative impact on sales.
“Stevens Arms” enters the record as american firearms maker. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Stevens, Arms and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7615457. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1864, 1902, 1915 and 1920.
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This entry incorporates text from “Stevens Arms” 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.