The Haunted House That Guns Built

By Trevor Burrus Trevor Burrus

The Gunning of America: Business and the Making of American Gun Culture
By Pamela Haag
Basic Books, 2015, $29.99, 528 pages

Sarah Winchester was the widow of William Winchester, and William’s father Oliver was the pater familias of the Winchester gun company. Oliver died in December 1880, and William succumbed to tuberculosis four months later. Two months after that, Sarah’s mother died. By mid-1881, Sarah was essentially alone. But she also held 48 percent of the stock for the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. And the stock paid dividends, between 21 and 79 percent of profits every year from 1869 to 1914.

Upon William’s death, his wealthy widow got on a train in New Haven and went west until she couldn’t go further. She ended up in San Jose, then a burgeoning town still feeling the aftereffects of the gold rush. She bought some land and began building a house—and kept building, and building, and building. When she died in 1922, the house was still under construction: a confusing, ad hoc, and immense mansion of 160 rooms filled with inscrutable architectural choices. Doors open onto walls; staircases go nowhere; halls wind back and forth; rooms are built within rooms. The whole disorienting, labyrinthine …Read the Rest

Source:: Cato Institute