Cyrus McCormick (February 16, 1809 - May 13, 1884)

Cyrus Hall McCormick was born February 15, 1809 on the McCormick family farm known as Walnut Grove in Rockbridge County, Virginia, in the Shenandoah Valley. He was the oldest of eight children and had little or no formal education. Although the plantation kept some slaves, every family member was expected to help during harvest. From a young age, McCormick preferred using machines to save work in the fields. In his teens he devised a scythe cradle, and then patented plows that could be used on hillsides and sharpened themselves. His father kept a workshop to repair and build machines such as those for mills on the property. Cyrus McCormick was responsible for liberating farm workers from hours of back-breaking labor by introducing the farmers to his newly invented mechanical reaper in July 1831. By 1847, Cyrus McCormick began the mass manufacture of his reaper in a Chicago factory. The invention of two successful reaping machines - independently by Obed Hussey in Ohio, who obtained the first patent in 1834, and by Cyrus Hall McCormick in Virginia - brought about an end to tedious handiwork and encouraged the invention and manufacture of other labor-saving farm implements and machinery. The first reapers cut the standing grain and, with a revolving reel, swept it onto a platform from which it was raked off into piles by a man walking alongside. It could harvest more grain than five men using the earlier cradles.


The next innovation, patented in 1858, was a self-raking reaper with an endless canvas belt that delivered the cut grain to two men who riding on the end of the platform, bundled it. Meanwhile, Cyrus McCormick had moved to Chicago, built a reaper factory, and founded what eventually became the International Harvester Company. In 1872 he produced a reaper which automatically bound the bundles with wire. In 1880, he came out with a binder which, using a magical knotting device (invented by John F. Appleby a Wisconsin pastor) bound the handles with twine. The reaper was eventually replaced by the self-propelled combine, operated by one man, which cuts gathers, threshes, and sacks the grain mechanically. The reaper was the first step in a transition from hand labor to the mechanized farming of today. It brought about an industrial revolution, as well as a vast change in agriculture. McCormick died in Chicago on May 13, 1884; he had been handicapped for the last four years of his life. He was buried in Graceland Cemetery in Chicago. The official leadership of the company passed on to his son, Cyrus Hall McCormick, Jr. The McCormick factories were later the site of urban labor strikes that led to the Haymarket Square riot in 1886.