for him the highest regard of all who knew him; and he had a wide circle of friends.

It is said that he was on intimate terms with every President of the United States from George Washington to John Quincy Adams.

But his health had been impaired by hardships endured in the South, in the long struggle over the cotton gin, and he died in 1825, at the age of fifty-nine.

The business which he founded remained in his family for ninety years.

It was carried on after his death by two of his nephews and then by his son, until 1888, when it was sold to the Winchester Repeating Arms Company of New Haven.
Here then, in these early New England gunshops, was born the American system of interchangeable manufacture.