The Civil War Sesquicentennial at the American Precision Museum

In May 2012, the museum opens two new exhibitions commemorating the American Civil War.

Full Duty: The Civil War Collection of Howard Coffin presents the first-ever exhibition of the private collection of one of Vermont’s foremost Civil War historians.
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Arming the Union uncovers the surprising influence of a little-known Vermont factory. Operating out of the old Robbins & Lawrence armory in Windsor, the machine tool firm Lamson, Goodnow & Yale played a critical role in outfitting the Union Army. Read more....

The two stories also overlap—and not simply because Vermont soldiers, like everyone else in the Union Army, carried weapons produced on Vermont-made machinery. Half a dozen young men actually worked in the Windsor armory before shouldering rifles and heading off to war. Both exhibits are set inside the actual nineteenth-century factory building where the gunmaking machinery was perfected and built, and where 50,000 Special Model Springfield rifles were also produced.

Together these two exhibitions present a view of Vermont’s role in the Civil War as it has never been seen before: the home front, the battlefield, and the powerful connections between the two.