Winchester

New Haven, Connecticut · the maker that bought its way into knives — and the “1920” that isn't a year

Researched & written by Ethan Trex, a lifelong pocket-knife collector. · Reviewed August 2026

The other great gun company to become a cutler took the opposite road from Remington: rather than build a knife works from scratch, Winchester bought one — three, in fact — and sold the results through its own “Winchester Store” dealer program, promising a knife “as good as the gun.” This entry follows that run from the 1919 acquisitions to the 1942 exit, the decoder that reads a Winchester number, the signature #1920 Folding Hunter, and the stamp-tier logic that dates one — with the reproduction trap the licensed reissues laid decades later.

Corporate genealogy — the gun-maker that bought three cutleries

Winchester's route into knives was acquisition, not invention of a works: Eagle and Napanoch in 1919, then Walden via the 1922 Simmons deal — all consolidated at New Haven.

• 1866Winchester Repeating Arms Company formed at New Haven, CT (Oliver F. Winchester), out of the Volcanic / New Haven Arms line. ~ S14
• 1919Enters cutlery by buying two knife firms: Eagle Knife Co. (New Haven — for its automated blade machinery) and Napanoch Knife Co. (NY — for its cutlers, moved to New Haven). The contrast with Remington, which built from scratch. ~ S15
• 1919–21A cluster of Winchester-assigned knife patents — Hemming's Pocket-knife (above), Smith's multiblade liner (US 1,359,760), Hemingway's knife-scale rivet (US 1,339,197). ✓ primary · S1–S3
• ~1920First Winchester-branded pocket knives at New Haven — “as good as the gun.” ~ S10
• 1922Winchester-Simmons Company — with E.C. Simmons (“Keen Kutter”); Simmons brought the Walden Knife Co. (est. 1870). Separated 1929. ~ S10
• 1923“The Winchester Store” dealer program running — verified on a dated catalog: “For Sale at THE WINCHESTER STORE / Winchester Repeating Arms Co. New Haven, Conn.” ✓ primary · S7
• 1931Federal receivership (Jan. 22); bought by the Western Cartridge Co. (Olin) — $3M cash + $4.8M preferred — sale completed Dec. 22. ✓ primary · S9
• 1933Under Olin, a shift to light-gauge machine-made “assortment” knives — the pre-1933 quality / post-1933 economy divide. ~ S10
• 1942Cutlery ends — reconversion to WWII arms. No Winchester knives again until Olin licensed the name (Blue Grass, late 1980s). Every genuine New Haven Winchester is now bracketed ~1920–1942. ~ S15

The Winchester number — a third distinct decoder

Winchester's number is coded — but by a different rule than its siblings. Case codes handle-material first; Remington codes it last; Winchester reads blade count · handle material · pattern. It sits on the pile side of the master blade.

1st digit = number of blades · 2nd digit = handle material · last two = the factory pattern (a trailing ½ = a size variant). More decodes: 2851 = 2 · 8 bone-stag · 51 (the “Gunstock” jack); 2324 = 2 · 3 pearl · 24 (a pearl pen). ~ S12

The second-digit handle key (a collector reconstruction — messy at the edges)

Notable patterns — what a collector hunts

The signature Winchester is the #1920 Folding Hunter — a big coke-bottle single-blade folder carried over from the Walden line, the marque's most-referenced (and most-reproduced) knife, the equivalent of Remington's Bullet. Others, all documented from stamped examples:

Value ladder by handle: bone → genuine stag → mother-of-pearl. Trap: 1950 is not a pre-war number — it appears only on modern knives (a 1989 lockback and imports); any lockback is a red flag, since era originals were slip-joints. ~ S10/S11

Handle materials of the era — and a name that isn't Winchester's

• Jigged bone (“Winchester bone”) — the signature, with distinctive peachseed jigging; the 1920s bone knives draw the most interest.
• Genuine stag and mother-of-pearl — the upper tiers; plus cocobolo/wood and nickel-silver frames with pinned crest shields.
• Fancy celluloids — Christmas tree, cracked ice, candy stripe, goldstone, waterfall, “end-of-day” — heavily on the 1930s assortment and advertising knives.

Seed corrected: “Pyremite” is Remington's celluloid trade name, not Winchester's — Winchester's celluloids were named by color/pattern. ~ S10

Dating a knife by its tang stamp — tiers, not a year sequence

Unusually, Winchester left no year-by-year stamp sequence (Case did; Winchester didn't). The stamp variants are quality-tier / transitional artifacts, so the levers are the tier, the pattern-number rule, and the reproduction tells.

Original (~1920–42) vs. reproduction (1987+)

After 1942 the name was licensed again — most importantly the Blue Grass Cutlery (marketer) / Queen Cutlery (maker) “Black Box” knives, 1987–~92, struck from original dies with the same pattern numbers. So the number can't date the knife. The tells:

Trademark & the price gap — Winchester's evidence profile

Two honest structural facts round out the picture, and they shape how you date a Winchester:

The three profiles side by side: Case — a trademark and a patent, but no price list. Remington — neither, but a printed, image-verified price. Winchester — a whole patent cluster, but no obtainable price. Each brand lights up a different corner of the same evidence problem.

In period print

Winchester entered cutlery in 1920, and advertised its knives with the same swagger as its rifles — sold through “Winchester Stores,” forged of chrome-vanadium steel. The whole record clusters in the 1920s. Each quote was read on the original page; all are public-domain newspapers.

Sources

Primary sources are documents read directly; secondary are reliable leads. Full metadata (identifiers, URLs, quotes) lives in data/winchester.json.

1. U.S. Patent 1,337,769, “Pocket-knife,” Otto L. Hemming, assigned Winchester Repeating Arms Co., 1920 (the flagship plate). Also the cluster: US 1,359,760 (Smith) & US 1,339,197 (Hemingway rivet). Google Patents · PD · opened. ✓ S1–S3
2. U.S. Patent 702,098, B.C. Hemming's “Automatic Glazing-Machine,” 1902 — the Eagle blade-machine that made the acquisition worthwhile. PD · opened. ✓ S4
3. USPTO TSDR — WINCHESTER Reg. 142,353 (firearms, 1921) & Reg. 959,312 (“KNIVES,” 1973). Read directly. ✓ S5/S6
4. Winchester Pocket Catalog of Tools, 1923 (WinchesterPocketCatalogOfTools1923) & the 1920 Iron Age export entry — the Winchester Store + New Haven, PD, opened (tools, not knives). ✓ S7/S8
5. TIME, “Business: Winchester & Western,” Nov. 9 1931 — receivership + Olin terms. ✓ S9
6. Secondary / leads: BladeForums's Winchester history (the best narrative); AllAboutPocketKnives (tang stamps, numbering, repro tells); the Official Price Guide to Collector Knives (the handle key); Levine and Ritchie & Stewart; Winchester Collector & Connecticut History; Queen Cutlery History (Blue Grass reissues); and the archival priced catalogs (the 1926-27 Product Catalog; the Smithsonian Winchester-Simmons trade catalogs) plus Williamson's 1952 company history. ~ S10–S19