'Remington is Ilion': Village must find future without company that defined its past

Mayor John Stephens has no idea what it will be like to live in Ilion without Remington Arms.

“I’m 57-years-old and I’ve never seen anything but them here,” he said.

Neither has anyone else.

The manufacturer has been producing firearms in Herkimer County since long before the village existed. It produced its first gun in 1816 when the area was known as Morgan’s Landing, Stephens said.

More than three decades later, in 1852, Ilion was incorporated, he said.

“Remington is Ilion and Ilion is Remington … Nobody that’s been born and raised here knows anything but Remington,” said Stephens. “It’s a 34-acre facility in the middle of our village and that’s what we’re known for. You go anywhere in the world and say ‘Ilion, New York,’ and people know that’s where Remington is. It’s been stamped on their rifles for 208 years.”

Closing Remington

But those 208 years will end in March. That’s when RemArms, the company’s latest iteration under the ownership of the Roundhill Group LLC, plans to close the Ilion factory, lay off all of its not quite 300 workers and move operations to Georgia.

In explaining the move, company officials described the ineffectiveness and expense of trying to run the aging, 1- million-square-foot factory in Ilion. They also mentioned the more gun-friendly political environment in Georgia.

Ask anyone about the relationship between the village and the manufacturer and you’ll likely get an answer remarkably similar to Stephens’.

“Remington and the Remington brand has been synonymous with Ilion and with Herkimer County for over 208 years,” said Vincent “Jim” Bono, chairman of the Herkimer County Board of Legislators and a member of the Industrial Development Authority.

“Ilion is Remington. Remington is Ilion,” echoed Frank “Rusty” Brown, an Ilion native, current Newville resident, RemArms furnace operator and president of the United Mine Workers of America Local 717. “And we all say that. It’s been that way for years.”

The shuttering of the factory in the heart of the village will certainly strike at the village’s heart as families lose their paychecks, the village loses its largest employer and a major taxpayer, and generations of tradition evaporate. Brown’s grandchildren who live in the village will be the first generation without the opportunity to grow up to work at Remington Arms, he pointed out.

“Iconic factory closing? It’s just a slap in the face and a kick in the gut,” Brown said. “It’s like, are you kidding me after all these years? It hurts and I’m sure it hurts everyone.”

Family

Brown, 59, grew up across the street from Remington Arms, raised on his parents’ Remington paychecks. He graduated from the Ilion high school in 1982 and went to work at the factory in 1995.

“Back then in the 80s and 90s, it was owned by DuPont. Your health care was amazing,” Brown recalled. “Your wage was great. I mean it was good paying, health care, all of that stuff. And you didn’t have to pay for health care.”

But 11 months after getting hired, Brown was laid off for the first time, remaining out of Remington Arms for three years.  He found another job in the meantime, but the layoff also gave him time to help organize the plant’s union.

Now he, his wife Lisha and his two daughters, Jessica and Jennifer, as well as a son-in-law all work there. “So it’s times five for me with this closure,” Brown said.

He was laid off again in 2020 after Remington Arms went bankrupt and closed the plant, but came back to work in May 2022 after the Roundhill Group bought the company.  He and his wife are both still owed severance pay from the 2020 layoff, Brown said.

The layoff in March will be awkward for them since neither he nor his wife are quite old enough to retire. “It puts us out looking for a job after all these years,” he said, “and coming up with a bridge to retirement.”

Money

Stephens grew up on a Remington paycheck, too. The fear and talk was always there, that Remington Arms might close up shop, he said. Now that the worst is happening, Stephens is determinedly optimistic.

“It’s always been said, but nothing’s ever really come to fruition. But unfortunately, now it has,” he said. “But we’ll get through it.”

In the days after the closure announcement, Stephens and other officials were still trying to put together a better understanding of the closure’s economic impact, including just how much RemArms pays in local property taxes, Stephens said.

It won’t be nearly as big a hit to the village as a closure would have been the first time he became mayor in 2010 when the plant had 1,300 to 1,400 employees, he noted. “But it’s still a big hit,” Stephens said. “The historic and the nostalgic hit is probably as big, if not bigger, than the financial hit we’re going to take.”

At one time, a Remington Arms closure, once the biggest employer in Herkimer County would have had a big economic impact on the county, Bono said. But as the workforce has dwindled from its high of more than 3,500, its countywide economic impact has, too, he said.

Really the village of Ilion and the utilities that serve the plant are the ones who will bear the brunt of the loss, Bono said. “They’re going to have to tighten their belt,” he said.

The county for its part might have to pay out some unemployment and welfare benefits to the laid off workers, Bono acknowledged. But he doesn’t expect the ripple effects of unemployment to stretch too far given the plant’s skilled workforce, he said.

“The one cushion in all this is that there are thousands of jobs in the three-county area —by that, I mean in Herkimer, Oneida and, I believe, Madison County — with the same skill set,” Bono said.

In fact, he’s already heard about a few companies reaching out to Remington Arms employees about jobs.

Vacancy

Come March, the hole in Ilion’s heart left by the closure of the plant will match the hole in its downtown with 34 acres sitting unused. “It will be horrible,” Brown said, thinking about regularly driving by the unused factory.

But his thoughts, like those of local officials, immediately turned to re-use. “I would like to see a manufacturer of something come in and offer the same opportunities to the people in the Mohawk Valley that have been there for over 200 years,” he said.

For Brown, that would mean an opportunity to finish out his career in the heart of Ilion and for his children, maybe even his grandchildren, to finish out their working years in the village, too, he said.

But it’s far too early for drawing up re-use plans, officials pointed out. RemArms still owns the site and has given no indication yet of its plans for the buildings, the land or the machinery inside. The county stands ready to offer help, such as by marketing the site through the Herkimer County Industrial Development Agency, Bono said, but at this point, he doesn’t know whether RemArms wants help or exactly what kind of help it would need.

“Plan A, obviously, was to always keep them here,” Stephens acknowledged. “Plan B, we had some things discussed, nothing ever really in concrete. We do have some things started. But again, it’s too early in the game.”

More: Remington Arms moving headquarters to Georgia; company says Ilion jobs will stay

Buoyed by another recent success story, Bono and Stephens remain optimistic. The 10.7-acre brownfield site on Spruce Street in Ilion, once the site of clothing and thermalwear manufacturer Duofold, has been bought and is undergoing a cleanup by the Lahinch Group, which will convert the site to commercial space and apartments.

Neither Stephens nor Bono was aware of any existing environmental assessment of the Remington site and neither knows of any issues. But it wouldn’t be a huge surprise given that the plant used oil and solvents, Bono said.

But there are definitely pluses to the site to attract new companies. Power is cheap in Ilion where the village has its own electric plant; there’s plenty of water; the village has paid fire and police departments; and the schools are good, Bono said.

“The building, although it’s 200 plus years old,” he said before adding, “the bones of the building are in good shape.”

Perhaps it will end up being a mini-industrial park, he said.

“I don’t think we’ll find one company that will take that facility,” Stephens said. “That doesn’t mean that we can’t get a dozen or two dozen smaller, like a restaurant or a light manufacturer.”

History

Once the factory closes and a new business or businesses take over the site, there won’t be too much left in Ilion to reflect its long and deep ties to Remington Arms, just a small street by the factory named Remington Arms and the Ilion Little Theater, which bought and moved into the carriage house and stables of the one-time Remington mansion in 1927.

But the mansion, where the Remington family hosted royalty, was torn down by its owners, who didn’t know “how to be that type of family,” Stephens said.

And they weren’t keen on self promotion, he said; there are no parks, buildings or other places in the village named after any of the Remingtons.

A lot of the dual history of the plant and the village is, or at least was, preserved in a museum in the factory complex with guns, typewriters and other items made by Remington. But the museum hasn’t been open for at least two years, Stephens and Brown said. (The site also had a “country store” that sold Remington shirts, hats and other memorabilia, but it closed several years ago, possibly in 2020, Brown said.)

No one knows for sure how many of the museum’s artifacts remain inside. But Stephens, Bono and Brown all agreed that they would love to see those artifacts remain in a permanent Remington Arms museum in Ilion, a link to the village’s past.

“I would really love to see something either built or made in the village of Ilion to keep that history,” Brown said. “And I don’t know if that will happen with the new company or not, but, to me, keeping that historic museum in the village of Ilion somewhere that people could still see the history would be just amazing.”

For his part, Stephens would love to see a museum opened on the first floor of the factory’s main building by the main entrance in the former custom shop where skilled artisans engraved and inlaid gold on custom stocks in years past, he said. That’s where a prince from Saudi Arabia would go to see the progress on his firearm, far from the dirt and noise of the factory floor, he said.

But, if Ilion residents are going to feel the pain of the separation from Remington Arms, many predict the company will suffer, too.

“Everybody knows somebody who worked at Remington,” Bono said. “Everybody knows a family with generations that have worked there.

“For them to move, I wish them well, I really do. However, I do believe they’re not going to find the experience, the dedication and the knowledge that the workforce has here.”

This article originally appeared on Observer-Dispatch: Remington closure will cost Ilion jobs, taxes, tradition