He became a traveling salesman, venturing as far as Ohio and Pennsylvania, with one intention: to create a market for reapers. Realizing that customers were not going to beat down his door, McCormick decided to sell the machine himself. Perhaps for that reason, it would be another six years before he sold his first machine, which by then was known as the Virginia Reaper. The earliest reapers were complicated contraptions, with lots of moving parts, and did not hold up well. There was another trial run in 1833, and a Lexington weekly newspaper reporter who witnessed the demonstration penned a tepid endorsement, saying of the machine, “It gave general satisfaction.” The year after that, McCormick secured his first patent and offered his machine for sale. Once that window closed, the inventor had to wait a whole year for his next chance. There were only seven to 10 days in the summer when wheat was ready to harvest. McCormick made some alterations, but testing a reaping machine was problematic. The noise scared the horses, requiring two men to walk alongside to keep the animals calm. He tested it before a crowd of Lexington farmers in a neighbor’s oat field, and according to historical accounts, it worked well enough. By 1831, McCormick and one of the slaves, Jo Anderson, had fashioned a rudimentary, horse-drawn reaping machine that seemed to work better than his father’s previous attempts. In the blacksmith’s forge and workshops at Walnut Grove (now a small museum), young McCormick, his father, brothers and slaves worked to design and improve farm implements. That year, they built a fine brick house on the edge of a pretty farm they called Walnut Grove, located today just off Interstate 81, halfway between Lexington and Staunton. The McCormicks lived in a log cabin in Rockbridge County until Cyrus turned 13. In fact, Robert McCormick had been working on a reaper when Cyrus, his oldest child, was born in February 1809, so there was never a time in Cyrus’ life when reapers weren’t part of the family agenda. McCormick inherited his inventive nature from his father, a tireless tinkerer who designed and manufactured a hemp binder, a thresher and some blacksmith bellows, and sold a few of each to nearby farmers. At the time of his death, in 1884, McCormick’s company was making 50,000 reapers a year. At one time, probably before the Civil War, McCormick had almost 100 competitors, and yet he became the largest producer of reapers in America. How? His edge over his competition was simple: He was a farmer who invented, while his rivals were inventors who knew little of farming. In the end, Cyrus McCormick outmaneuvered them all. During the next two decades, numerous American inventors entered the field, literally and figuratively, each patenting reaper improvements and each manufacturing a few-or a few dozen-machines. This was the logical birthplace for a mechanical reaper, and in the 1830s, several Americans patented their designs. Over the centuries, various attempts were made to conceive such a machine, but the abundance of cheap labor-serfs, slaves or peasants-mitigated the potential economic rewards of replacing muscle with machinery.īut in the vast continent that was America, conditions were different. In the days of the Roman Empire, Pliny the Elder described an early reaping device consisting of an ox-pushed cart with a wooden comb that would cut stalks of grain. Since the earliest days of farming, people had talked of developing a tool that would ease the backbreaking drudgery of harvesting with sickles. In doing so, he brought about the greatest revolution in farming since the invention of the plow. What McCormick did do, however, was more important than mere conception: He was the first to demonstrate the labor-saving value of a reaper-and the first person to sell it on a widespread basis, across America and in other nations. Other men built reapers before McCormick, born 200 years ago in Rockbridge County, and other men manufactured them before and during his time. This combined with his marketing innovations would make him synonymous with a revolutionary farming machine.įorget what you learned in school: While historians credit Cyrus Hall McCormick as being the “father of the mechanical reaper,” the quiet farmer from the Valley of Virginia did not actually invent the famous grain-harvesting machine. Lots of people made and sold reapers in the 19th century-but McCormick made his more efficient than anybody’s. Cyrus McCormick, born 200 years ago in Virginia, was described by some as “cold, imperious and calculated to inspire awe.” Perhaps that’s because he spent his life obsessed with a grain-harvesting contraption known as a reaper.
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