Cyrus Hall McCormick was born on February 15, 1809, and died on May 13, 1884. He was an American inventor and businessman who started the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company. This company later became part of the International Harvester Company in 1902. McCormick was originally from the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia. He and many members of his family became well-known residents of Chicago.

McCormick claimed to be the only inventor of the mechanical reaper. However, he was one of several engineers who created working models of the machine in the 1830s. His work used the efforts of his father, Robert McCormick Jr., who had worked on similar designs for more than 20 years. Jo Anderson, an enslaved African-American man owned by the family, also helped with the designs. McCormick successfully created a modern company that included manufacturing, marketing, and a sales team to sell his inventions.

Early life and career

Cyrus Hall McCormick was born on February 15, 1809, in Raphine, Virginia. He was the oldest of eight children born to Robert McCormick Jr., an inventor, and Mary Ann "Polly" Hall. His father saw the value of a mechanical reaper design and asked for a patent to claim it as his own invention. He worked for 28 years to create a horse-drawn mechanical reaper for harvesting grain but never made a reliable version.

Cyrus continued his father’s work on the reaper with help from Jo Anderson, an enslaved African-American man who lived on the McCormick plantation. At that time, some machines based on a design by Patrick Bell of Scotland (which was not patented) were already in the United States. The Bell machine was pushed by horses, while the McCormick design was pulled by horses and cut grain on one side of the team.

Cyrus held one of his first demonstrations of the mechanical reaper in Steeles Tavern, Virginia, in 1831. He said he completed a final version of the reaper in 18 months. In 1834, he received a patent for the reaper on June 21, two years after getting a patent for a self-sharpening plow. However, no machines were sold because the device could not handle different conditions.

The McCormick family also ran a business that made metal tools and processed metal. The financial crisis of 1837 nearly caused the family to go bankrupt when a business partner left. In 1839, Cyrus began more public demonstrations of the reaper, but farmers still thought the machine was unreliable. He sold one reaper in 1840 but none in 1841.

Cyrus used a recommendation from his father’s first customer, Khane Axel Hale, for a machine made by McPhetrich, to improve his design. He sold seven reapers in 1842, 29 in 1843, and 50 in 1844. All were built by hand in the family’s farm shop. He received a second patent for reaper improvements on January 31, 1845.

As news about the reaper spread, McCormick received orders from farther west, where farms were larger and land flatter. While in Washington, D.C., to claim his 1845 patent, he learned about a factory in Brockport, New York, and arranged for the machines to be mass-produced there. He also allowed others across the country to build the reaper, but the quality of their machines was often poor, which damaged the product’s reputation.

Move to Chicago

In 1847, after their father passed away, Cyrus and his brother Leander J. McCormick (1819–1900) moved to Chicago. There, they started a factory to build their machines. At that time, other cities in the Midwest, such as Cleveland, Ohio; St. Louis, Missouri; and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, were more developed. Chicago had the best water transportation from the east over the Great Lakes for raw materials, as well as railroad links to the west, where most of their customers lived.

When McCormick tried to renew his patent in 1848, the U.S. Patent Office said a similar machine had already been patented by Obed Hussey a few months earlier. McCormick claimed he invented his machine in 1831, but the renewal was denied. William Manning of Plainfield, New Jersey, had also received a patent for his reaper in May 1831. However, Manning did not seem to be defending his patent at the time.

McCormick’s brother, William Sanderson McCormick (1815–1865), moved to Chicago in 1849. He joined the company to manage financial matters. The McCormick reaper sold well, partly because of clever and creative business strategies. Their products became available at a time when the rapid growth of railroads made it easier and cheaper to distribute goods widely. McCormick created marketing and sales methods, training a large group of salespeople to show how his machines worked in the field. These salespeople also knew how to quickly replace parts or repair machines during important farming seasons.

A company advertisement was based on the painting Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way by Emanuel Leutze. The ad added the words: "with McCormick Reapers in the Van."

In 1851, McCormick traveled to London to show a reaper at the Crystal Palace Exhibition. After his machine successfully harvested a field of green wheat while Hussey’s machine failed, he received a gold medal and was admitted to the Legion of Honor. His celebration ended quickly when he learned he had lost a court case related to Hussey’s patent.

Legal controversies and success

Another competitor of the McCormick Company was John Henry Manny from Rockford, Illinois. After Manny's Reaper was shown to be better than McCormick's at the Paris Exposition in 1855, McCormick started a legal case against Manny for using a patented invention without permission. McCormick asked Manny to stop making reapers and pay $400,000. The trial, originally planned for Chicago in September 1855, had well-known lawyers from both sides. McCormick hired Reverdy Johnson, a former U.S. Attorney General, and Edward Nicholl Dickerson, a patent lawyer from New York. Manny hired George Harding and Edwin Stanton. Because the trial was in Illinois, Harding brought in Abraham Lincoln, a local Illinois lawyer. Manny won the case after it was reviewed by the U.S. Supreme Court.

In 1856, McCormick's factory made more than 4,000 reapers each year, mostly sold in the Midwest and West. However, in 1861, Hussey's patent was renewed, but McCormick's was not. McCormick's strong opposition to Lincoln and the anti-slavery Republican party may have hurt his legal situation. McCormick then asked the U.S. Congress for help to protect his patent.

In 1871, the factory was destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire, but McCormick rebuilt it and reopened in 1873. In 1879, McCormick's brother, Leander, changed the company's name from "Cyrus H. McCormick and Brothers" to "McCormick Harvesting Machine Company." This made Cyrus upset because Leander tried to highlight the contributions of other family members, especially their father, to the invention of the reaper.

Family relationships

On January 26, 1858, 49-year-old Cyrus McCormick married Nancy "Nettie" Fowler. She was an orphan from New York who graduated from the Troy Female Seminary and moved to Chicago. They met six months earlier and had similar ideas about business, religion, and politics related to the Democratic Party. They had seven children:

• Cyrus Hall McCormick Jr. was born May 16, 1859.
• Mary Virginia McCormick was born May 5, 1861.
• Robert McCormick III was born October 5, 1863, and died January 6, 1865.
• Anita McCormick was born July 4, 1866. She married Emmons Blaine on September 26, 1889, and died February 12, 1954. Emmons was a son of the US. Secretary of State James G. Blaine.
• Alice McCormick was born March 15, 1870, and died less than a year later on January 25, 1871.
• Harold Fowler McCormick was born May 2, 1872. He married Edith Rockefeller and died in 1941. Edith was the youngest daughter of Standard Oil co-founder John Davison Rockefeller and schoolteacher Laura Celestia "Cettie" Spelman.
• Stanley Robert McCormick was born November 2, 1874. He married Katharine Dexter (1875–1967) and died January 19, 1947.

Mary and Stanley both had schizophrenia. Stanley McCormick's life inspired the 1998 novel Riven Rock by T. Coraghessan Boyle.

Cyrus McCormick was an uncle of Robert Sanderson McCormick (son-in-law of Joseph Medill); granduncle of Joseph Medill McCormick and Robert Rutherford McCormick; and great-granduncle of William McCormick Blair Jr.

Activism

McCormick was a faithful Presbyterian who supported bringing Christians together. He lived by Calvinist values such as self-control, being serious, saving money, working hard, and being moral. He believed that using his invention, the reaper, to help feed people was part of his religious duty.

Before the American Civil War, McCormick was a lifelong Democrat who wrote articles in his newspapers, The Chicago Times and Herald, urging the North and South to work together. However, these ideas were not popular in his new hometown. Even though his invention helped supply food to Union soldiers, McCormick thought the Confederacy might not be defeated. During the war, he and his wife traveled widely in Europe. In 1864, he ran for Congress as a Democrat in Illinois’s 2nd district, promoting peace, but lost to Republican John Wentworth. He also suggested a plan for peace that included a group to settle disputes. After the war, McCormick helped create the Mississippi Valley Society, which aimed to improve trade between Europe and ports in New Orleans and Mississippi. He also supported efforts to add the Dominican Republic to the United States. From 1872 to 1876, he served on the Illinois Democratic Party’s Central Committee. Later, he proposed a system to manage food production and distribution globally.

McCormick was the main supporter and a leader of the Theological Seminary of the Northwest, which moved to Chicago’s Lincoln Park in 1859. That year, he funded four professor positions at the school. After his death in 1886, the institution was renamed McCormick Theological Seminary. It later moved to Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood in 1975 and shared space with the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago.

In 1869, McCormick gave $10,000 to help Dwight L. Moody start the YMCA. His son, Cyrus Jr., later became the first leader of the Moody Bible Institute. McCormick and his wife, Nettie Day McCormick, also gave money to Tusculum College, a Presbyterian school in Tennessee, and helped build churches and Sunday Schools in the South after the war. Even though the South was slow to use his farming tools and methods, they supported these efforts. In 1872, McCormick bought a religious newspaper called The Interior, renamed it The Continent, and made it a major Presbyterian publication.

For the last 20 years of his life, McCormick supported and served on the board of trustees at Washington and Lee University in his home state of Virginia. His brother, Leander, also gave money to build an observatory on Mount Jefferson, operated by the University of Virginia, which was named the McCormick Observatory.

Later life and death

During the last four years of his life, McCormick became unable to move around after a stroke paralyzed his legs. He could not walk during his final two years. He died at home in Chicago on May 13, 1884. He was buried in Graceland Cemetery. He was survived by his wife, Nettie, who continued his Christian and charitable work in the United States and other countries from 1890 until her death in 1923. She donated $8 million (over $160 million in today’s money) to hospitals, disaster relief groups, churches, youth programs, and schools. She became the most important supporter of Presbyterian Church activities during that time.

Official leadership of the company went to his oldest son, Cyrus Hall McCormick Jr., but his grandson, Cyrus McCormick III, managed the company. Four years later, the company’s labor practices (paying workers $9 per week) caused the Haymarket riots. Eventually, Cyrus Jr. worked with J.P. Morgan to form the International Harvester Corporation in 1902. After Cyrus Hall McCormick Jr., Harold Fowler McCormick led International Harvester. Members of the McCormick family remained involved with the company until Brooks McCormick, who died in 2006.

Legacy and honors

Many prizes and medals were given to McCormick for his invention of the reaper, which made farming work easier and increased how much food could be produced. This helped change farming into an industry and caused many workers to move from farms to cities in countries that grow wheat (36 countries by the time McCormick died). In 1851, the French government honored McCormick by giving him the title of Officier de la Légion d'honneur. In 1878, he was chosen as a member of the French Academy of Sciences because he helped agriculture more than any other person alive at that time.

The Wisconsin Historical Society keeps Cyrus McCormick's papers.

• After Cyrus and Leander McCormick moved to Chicago, the Cyrus McCormick Farm was run by other family members. Later, the farm was donated to Virginia Tech, which now uses part of the land as a free museum and other parts as an experimental farm. A marker that honors McCormick’s work in agriculture was placed near the main house in 1928.
• In 1999, the city of Chicago put up a historical marker near the site of McCormick’s old home at 675 N. Rush St., between Erie and Huron. His original home there was destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, and the replacement home was later torn down in the 1950s.
• A statue of McCormick was built on the main campus of Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, by Serbian-American artist John David Brcin.
• The town of McCormick, South Carolina, and McCormick County were named after him after he purchased a gold mine in the town, which was previously called Dornsville.
• In 1975, McCormick was added to the Junior Achievement U.S. Business Hall of Fame.
• In 1940, the U.S. Postal Service released 3-cent stamps to honor Cyrus Hall McCormick. These stamps were part of the Famous Americans Series of 1940.