Remington Model 1861 Army

About the Remington Model 1861 Army

The Remington Model 1861 Army, commonly called the 'Old Model Army' or 'Old Army', is a .44 caliber percussion (cap-and-ball) single-action revolver made by E. Remington & Sons of Ilion, New York. A solid-frame, six-shot design built around the top-strap frame pioneered in the Beals patents, it was the transitional model between the Remington-Beals Army of 1860 and the far more famous New Model Army of 1863 (the revolver later mislabeled by collectors as the 'Remington 1858'). The 1861 fires a .44 ball or conical bullet over a loose black-powder charge ignited by a percussion cap fitted to a nipple at the rear of each chamber, and is cocked manually for each of its six shots. Its 8-inch octagonal barrel and integral loading lever beneath sit on a frame whose enclosed top strap gave it greater rigidity and easier sight-to-sight alignment than the open-top Colt revolvers it competed against. The Model 1861 saw Union service in the opening years of the American Civil War, but a pair of design shortcomings cut its production short: a slotted ('grooved') loading lever that allowed the cylinder pin to creep forward under recoil and jam the action, and the absence of safety notches between the nipples for carrying the hammer down safely on a loaded cylinder. Both faults were corrected in the 1863 redesign.

The Model 1861's fatal quirk was its clever-but-flawed grooved loading lever: a slot in the lever let the cylinder pin be drawn forward to drop the cylinder out without lowering the lever - but under the recoil of firing, that same pin would creep forward and jam the cylinder solid, locking the gun up mid-fight. That defect, plus the lack of safety notches between the nipples, drove Remington's 1863 redesign into the legendary New Model Army that collectors later misnamed the 'Remington 1858'.

Remington Model 1861 Army specifications

Sources conflict on production: figures range from roughly 4,902 .44 revolvers actually delivered to the Ordnance Department under the July 1862 contract, up to around 12,000 .44 'Army' guns reportedly made, with only about 6,000 produced before the transition to the New Model Army in early 1863. The '1861' in the name is the patent date (Dec 17, 1861); volume manufacture ran into 1862. Designer attribution is contested: the underlying Beals/solid-frame lineage is credited to Fordyce Beals, while the specific Dec 17, 1861 improvement patent (No. 33,932) is attributed to William Elliott. Muzzle energy is computed from the militaryfactory bullet/velocity figures and should be treated as an estimate. Original barrel rifling specifics (twist direction and groove count) could not be confirmed for this model and are left partially null; modern reproductions of the New Model Army use 7-groove left-hand rifling.