jim rozen wrote:

In article , Tom Quackenbush says...

Springfield Arsenal?

Arsenal or armory?

Dang, might have tripped gunner up on something, regarding
firearms. A first.

The dial indicator that I use on my lathe for carriage
travel was obtained in a junk shop in the boston area,
and on the face of it, in red letters, are the words

"Springfield Armory."

FWIW.

From http://www.nps.gov/spar/home.html, web site for the Springfield
Armory National Historic Site:

"From 1794 to 1968 the Springfield Armory was a center for
the manufacture of U.S. Military small arms and the site of many
important technological advances. A large weapons museum is
now housed in the original Main Arsenal Building.
"The Armory site was selected by President George Washington
as the most strategic place to build the arsenal. Due to its position
atop the area's tallest hill, potential intruders could be seen from
miles away."

So contrary to Gunner's assertions that "Springfield rifles were
manufactured in Springfield Arsenal", it appears that the rifles were
actually manufactured at the Springfield *Armory* (possibly in the
Main Arsenal Building, though that isn't specified). Of course, this
could just be a case of egregious historical and lexicographical
errors by the liberal National Park Service. Likewise, the liberal
publishers of the American Heritage Dictionary could have erred when
writing that the Springfield rifle was "first made at the former U.S.
Armory at Springfield, Massachusetts."

As for definitions, there's this from the Houghton Mifflin "Reader's
Companion to Military History"
http://college.hmco.com/history/readerscomp/mil/html/ml_003700_arsenals.htm:

"Arsenals. Places for the centralized manufacture and storage of the
tools of war, arsenals appeared in Europe late in the middle ages. The
fact that arsenal comes from Arabic words meaning "house of
manufacture" bears witness to the Mediterranean origins of the
institution. Today the word has been generalized so that it can mean
the total assemblage of arms held by a state or even by an individual.
In Europe, but not in the United States, the term applies to naval
yards as well as to weapons plants and depots." [Various dictionaries
note that the English word arsenal comes from the Italian arsenale
(itself derived from an Arabic term), which originally referred to
naval shipyards.]

The same article refers to arms production at the "Springfield
arsenal" (with lower-case "a").

In addition to these references, I ran across the website for
Springfield Armory http://www.springfield-armory.com/, which
apparently is a present-day private gun manufacturer in Illinois. (I
imagine Richard will chime in here to tell us that it's run by a bunch
of idiots who don't know the difference between an armory and an
arsenal.)

Bert