SPRINGFIELD, Mass. (WGGB/WSHM) - As the United States moves closer to its 250th birthday, we continue our “We the People” series. This time, we’re highlighting one of the highest points in the City of Springfield.

In fact, the hill was chosen specifically because of its commanding views, especially of the Connecticut River. For almost 2 centuries America looked to Springfield to supply and produce world class firearms, and it’s all because of this — our nations very first armory.

An armory established in 1777 upon the recommendation of General Henry Knox, who’d traveled through the city a year earier - hauling some 60 tons of cannons to break the British siege of Boston.

General George Washington, a close friend of Knox, greenlighted that recommendation, and work began on what was originally called ‘The Continental Arsenal at Springfield: “In fact they weren’t quite making muskets yet. They were fixing them up, I mean certainly there was a company of armorers here, about a dozen guys. But their role was to take all the junk and then cobble together whatever they could to make a serviceable musket that could then get issued.”

As curator Alex MacKenzie explained, the arsenal also housed an assortment of craftsmen all working to produce an assortment of war supplies, with ammunition manufactured in what — at the time — was called “the laboratory”.

“The laboratory would roll musket cartridges or artillery cartridges and then box them up. Then the carpenters, and blacksmiths, and wheelwrights would make the wagons. The harness makers would make the tack and bridles for the horses and once they could get their hands on horse cartridges and be transported to the Continental Army or wherever it needed to go,” MacKenzie said.

If all that sounds labor intensive, it was.

It was also enough to declare victory over the British and formally seal our Independence as a free country. By the mid 1790’s, the Springfield Arsenal officially began operating less as a storehouse and more as a production line, becoming our nation’s first federal armory for the manufacturing of weapons.

“They were copying the French muskets, but they were making them wholly here at Springfield. And so that’s when the term Springfield Armory comes along and that’s why a lot of our dates date back to 1794 because that’s when they started making muskets from scratch” still though, output was middling at best.

Each musket, handmade by highly specialized craftsmen - took time to complete, and further, made production of spare parts difficult if not impossible because each weapon was unique.

That’s where American ingenuity and know-how kicked in and significantly kicked up manufacturing output.

“And so, by the 1830’s they kind of had figured it out in terms of how to make muskets interchangeable. That process became known as the armory system and then once that was adopted applied to all sorts of other manufactured goods then it became the American System and really the birth of the Industrial Revolution.”

By the mid 1800’s, and with the start of the Civil War, the armory saw explosive growth — going from a handful of rifled muskets produced per day, to up to a thousand, with a wartime peak of more than a quarter of a million in 1864 alone.

It was during the First World War that they introduced one of their most famous weapons, the M1903 Springfield. Still though, America’s most iconic rifle was yet to come developed by a firearms designer living in Springfield.

“There were guys working on the 1903 who had been working at the armory since the civil war - and that carried over an institutional knowledge that certainly carried through all the way to the end. And then the foresight to be able to bring in talented engineers such as John Garand,” MacKenzie said. His creation, the M1 Garand, was a weapon General George Patton famously described as “the greatest battle implement ever devised.” Garand gave his amazing design to the government royalty free, and of the more than 6 million rifles eventually produced, John Garand didn’t make a single dime on any of them.

It was during their production in World War II — the Springfield Armory reached its peak - operating 24 hours a day with nearly 14,000 employees, many of them women, and by January 1944, they were cranking out more than 200 rifles an hour.

Still, less than 3 decades later, the decision was made by the government to cut costs by using private contractors for firearm production.

And so, On April 30, 1968, the flag was lowered for the last time - ending 174 years of manufacturing on the hill in Springfield, a site Henry know called “one of the most proper spots in America on every account.”