Cyrus McCormick

Cyrus McCormick grew up on a Virginia farm watching his father lose twenty-eight years to a machine that would not work. Robert McCormick tried and failed, repeatedly, to build a horse-drawn reaper that could cut wheat without a man swinging a scythe behind it. Cyrus took up the problem with an enslaved blacksmith on the family's Walnut Grove farm, Jo Anderson, and between them they built a version that ran, demonstrated at Steele's Tavern in 1831 and patented on June 21, 1834. It did not sell. Farmers who had never seen a working reaper did not trust one, and by 1842 McCormick had moved only seven machines. The invention was finished years before anyone believed in it.

After his father died in 1847, McCormick moved the business to Chicago, where lake shipping brought in raw iron and rail lines carried finished reapers to the wheat belt. What made the company was not the machine but the selling of it: a trained sales force that demonstrated reapers in farmers' fields, guaranteed parts within days, and extended credit through harvest. Output went from a handful of machines a year to more than four thousand by 1856. He won a gold medal at London's Crystal Palace in 1851 by out-cutting a rival reaper, then lost a patent suit to the rival, Obed Hussey. A later infringement suit against manufacturer John Manny put Abraham Lincoln on the defense team, though Edwin Stanton froze him out, and McCormick lost that case too, on appeal to the Supreme Court.

The reaper that fed the Union Army was partly the work of a man McCormick never had to pay: Jo Anderson, enslaved on his father's farm, helped build and refine the machine before it ever reached a patent office bearing only McCormick's name. McCormick opposed the party that ended slavery, expected the Confederacy to win, and spent much of the Civil War in Europe, then ran for Congress in 1864 on a peace-with-the-South platform and lost badly. Wealth did not spare his family, either. Two of his seven children, Mary Virginia and Stanley, developed schizophrenia, and Stanley's case became the basis for a novel decades later. Four years after McCormick's death, his company was still paying Chicago factory workers nine dollars a week when the strike outside its plant helped ignite the Haymarket violence of 1886.

McCormick died in Chicago on May 13, 1884, after a stroke had left him an invalid for his last four years, and was buried at Graceland Cemetery. France had already named him an Officer of the Legion of Honor in 1851 and seated him among its Academy of Sciences, calling him a man who had done more for agriculture than anyone else alive. His son merged the company with its rivals in 1902, with financing from J. P. Morgan, to form International Harvester. The reaper is now filed alongside the cotton gin as one of the machines that pulled American farming out of hand labor and pushed workers toward the cities the machines helped feed.

Cyrus McCormick's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Mechanical reaper invention
  Built with enslaved blacksmith Jo Anderson at Walnut Grove 1831
• Reaper patent, U.S. No. 8,277 patent
  Granted June 21, 1834 1834
• McCormick Harvesting Machine Company company
  Relocated to Chicago after his father's death 1847
• McCormick Theological Seminary endowment other
  Endowed four professorships at the Presbyterian seminary 1859

• February 15, 1809 aged 0 Born in Rockbridge County, Virginia
• 1831 aged ~22 Demonstrates a working reaper at Steele's Tavern Built with enslaved blacksmith Jo Anderson.
• June 21, 1834 aged 25 Patents the mechanical reaper
• 1847 aged ~38 Moves the reaper business to Chicago after his father's death
• 1851 aged ~42 Wins a gold medal at the Crystal Palace Exhibition, then loses a patent suit to Obed Hussey
• 1855 aged ~46 Sues manufacturer John Manny for infringement Abraham Lincoln joins Manny's defense team and is sidelined by co-counsel Edwin Stanton — McCormick loses on appeal to the Supreme Court.
• January 26, 1858 aged 48 Marries Nancy "Nettie" Fowler
• 1864 aged ~55 Loses a run for Congress in Illinois on an anti-Republican peace platform
• May 13, 1884 aged 75 Dies in Chicago

• Abraham Lincoln 1809–1865
  16th President who preserved the Union during the Civil War and issued the Emancipation Proclamation. on the losing side of a McCormick patent suit
• Eli Whitney 1765–1825
  Inventor of the cotton gin, which revolutionized Southern agriculture and had profound economic impacts. fellow agricultural-technology revolutionary
• John D. Rockefeller 1839–1937
  Established the Rockefeller Foundation and funded medical research, education, and public health initiatives. family connected by his son's marriage
• J. P. Morgan 1837–1913
  Banking titan who stabilized the economy during the Panic of 1907 and shaped modern finance. financed the 1902 merger into International Harvester