Plymouth: the windmill town that became the home of the Daisy BB gun

“You’ll shoot your eye out” has a hometown, and it’s Plymouth, Michigan. The Red Ryder BB gun every kid in “A Christmas Story” begs for came out of a company that, by all rights, should have been making farm windmills.

That’s exactly what it set out to do. The Plymouth Iron Windmill Company opened in 1882 to turn out metal windmills for farmers, and it struggled almost from the start. Casting around for a way to move product, somebody hit on a sweetener: starting in 1888, buy a windmill and they’d throw in a little metal air rifle for free. The story goes that when the general manager squeezed off a test shot, he grinned and said, “Boy, that’s a daisy” — and the giveaway gun had its name before anyone realized it was the real business. The free rifle outsold the thing it was supposed to be promoting. By 1895 the company gave up on windmills entirely, made nothing but air guns, and renamed itself Daisy.

Daisy stayed put in Plymouth for about seventy years and shipped millions of BB guns out of town, the Red Ryder among them once it debuted in 1940. In 1958 it moved its manufacturing to Rogers, Arkansas, where it still runs. But the town kept the bones of the thing. One wall of the old factory still stands, and there’s a Daisy Square right where you’d hope to find it — a Detroit suburb quietly holding on to the day a failing windmill maker accidentally armed half of childhood.