Cyrus McCormick and the Reaper Revolution

Visiting the McCormick Blacksmith Shop and Forge near Steele’s Tavern, Virginia

The earliest practical reaping machines were introduced in the 1830s by father-son Robert and Cyrus McCormick of Steele’s Tavern, Virginia, Obed Hussey of Cincinnati, and Montgomery County, New York farmer Enoch Ambler. We had the chance to visit the original farm on our summer road trip across the country. The McCormicks fashioned their landmark model with the help of the family’s Black slave, Jo Anderson, in their Walnut Grove Farm’s blacksmith shop and successfully demonstrated in stands of wheat and oats in July 1831. Ambler and the McCormicks secured patents for their models in 1834. These horse-pulled machines featured a reciprocating bar of small sickle sections with separating fingers and reel that could cut up to fourteen to fifteen acres a day and increased output more than tenfold over the cradle scythe method. In the late 1850s brothers William and Charles Marsh, natives of Ontario who had relocated to Illinois, introduced the revolutionary “Marsh Reaper-Binder” than could both cut grain and tie sheaves into bundles. Rights to the Marsh machine were acquired by entrepreneurs William Deering and Elijah Gammon in the early 1870s and established their base of operations in North Chicago.

Informed by a generation of farmer-innovators, men like Hussey and Case, and the McCormicks and Marshes would revolutionize world agriculture. “This magical machinery of the wheatfield solves the mystery of prosperity,” lauded McCormick biographer Herbert Casson in The Romance of the Reaper (1908), and “explains the New Farmer and the miracles of scientific agriculture.” Casson observed with capitalized emphasis, “…[I]t is true that until recently the main object of all nations was to get bread. Life was a Search for Food—a desperate postponement of famine. …Then came King Reaper.”

McCormick, a devout Presbyterian, was also imbued with a keen business sense that would transform his humble Blue Ridge Mountain enterprise into the world’s leading manufacturer of farm equipment based in Chicago from 1847. His improved “Virginia Reaper” model made its European debut at the 1851 Great Exhibition in London which was the first large-scale industrial fair to include foreign exhibitors. A skeptical reporter for the Times jokingly dubbed McCormick’s reaper a “cross between an Astley chariot, a wheel-barrow, and a flying machine.” But in trials conducted that summer on farming estates at Tiptree Heath in Essex and Pusey, Berkshire, an enthused jury recognized that the new inventions would render the scythe as obsolete as the mechanical thresher would the flail. Although Prince Albert would later order two Hussey machines for royal farms, the judges awarded McCormick’s eagle-emblazoned machine its Grand Council gold medal and declared the device “worth the whole cost of the Exhibition.” By 1851 McCormick’s Chicago factory was turning out a thousand reapers a year and by 1859 approximately 50,000 were in use throughout the country. 

Cyrus McCormick 1834 Reaper Model

Cyrus McCormick’s passion for promotion matched his mechanical inventiveness and within a year colorful company advertisements cast his reaper in a scene as if a Roman conqueror appearing before an adoring crowd and bearing the prestigious award above a banner proclaiming it “Best in the World.” The 1853-1856 Crimean War between Great Britain and Russia interrupted export of grain from Ukraine to Europe which boosted commodity prices worldwide. American farmers responded with greater production and the favorable market brought a flood of new orders for improved equipment. McCormick deployed agents across the Midwest and eventually established a vast global network of outlets from London and Odessa to Melbourne and Wellington to sell in the grain districts of Europe and the British and Russian empires.

McCormick continued with Grand Gold Medal recognition at the glittering 1855 Paris Exposition Universelle where Emperor Louis Napoleon expressed special interest in the American’s invention. At the city’s next world’s fair eleven years later, McCormick was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor by imperial decree and other Grand Golds came from world fairs in Hamburg and Vienna. Grandiose promotional iconography with these international recognitions would be colorfully featured in company advertising that merged prosperity with ingenuity and gave rise to one of the era’s earliest and most successful transnational corporations.

Agricultural Equipment Display, London Crystal Palace Exhibition (1851)

Dickinson’s Comprehensive Pictures (1853)

McCormick and Hussey reapers, Pitts and Case threshers, Marsh binders, and other mechanical harvesting equipment came into widespread use in the United States in the 1850s, and in the following decade steam-powered threshing machines were commonplace. Small farmers still flailed crops in many areas, however, due to the early threshers’ expense and tendency to clog in heavy grain and crack kernels with the metal cylinders. By the 1870s reaper-binders appeared that could drop a half-dozen grain bundles at a time on the ground tied with wire and later with twine. The sheaves were then arranged into larger shocks to further ripen or be hauled directly on open wagons to stationary threshing machines. Cyrus Hall McCormick, Jr. took over leadership of the family enterprise after the death of his father in 1884, and the sprawling Chicago-based McCormick and William Deering companies merged with the Plano Harvester Company to form International Harvester Company (IHC) in 1902. By that time the three firms had acquired or consolidated with several competitors, employed some 30,000 workers, and were producing over a thousand reapers per week in “harvester war” competition worldwide.

The McCormick Reaper

I couldn’t help but smile at the special childhood memory brought to mind recently when local historian Manton Bailie, lifelong resident and farmer in rural community of Mesa, Washington, showed me some old farm equipment in rusty retirement at this place. When Manton told me about playing on the old horse-powered mechanical reaper it instantly brought back memories of my own Palouse Country boyhood. Although the old McCormick reapers on the hillside above our house had largely been invaded by the branches of cherry tree, a skinny youth could still wiggle down between wooden draper roll and outside iron wheel and dream of driving a tank.

Edwin Fulwider, Manton Poe (Manton Bailie’s grandfather of Mesa, Washington), The Ford Times (September, 1953)

The effectiveness of mechanical reapers like Manton’s and my grandfather’s equipment led to their widespread use throughout the country and subsequent improvements further reduced the need for rural laborers and rendered traditional field gleaning virtually impossible. While some loss of kernels took place as grain heads could shatter from the reaper’s wooden reel paddles, the stalks were effectively captured to be bound, carted, and threshed. But the ancient grain varieties native to Europe for thousands of years and introduced to the New World as early as the 1500s remained essentially unchanged until twentieth century plant genetics spawned hybridized cultivars resistant to shattering and lodging. The inexorable shift to technological modernity eclipsed eons of social and economic relationships that had guided human endeavor since the beginning of recorded history.

Reaping in the Olden Time; Above: Reaping in Our Time (1857)

“Reaping at Syracuse,” Harper’s Weekly (August 1, 1857)

The momentous tilt that brought greater productivity can be dated with some specificity through art and literature from the period. Explicit depiction of the new horse-power order was shown graphically in an August, 1857, issue of Harper’s Weekly. The unattributed author and artist depicted a gathering during the previous week of the influential U. S. Agricultural Society near Syracuse, New York. Crowds had surrounded a grain field there to witness a competition among ninety-five different mechanical reapers. A grand parade of contestants preceding the event led through an impressive castle façade adorned with colorful flags and banners casting mythic significance on the mechanical marvels, jousting drivers, and patron inventors.

“…[T]he days of the sickle are over,” proclaimed the reporter, who advised readers, “Lay it up—the old tool—in a museum, on a fair cushion; label it, number it, …for the time is coming when the sickle will be as rare as the headsman’s axe or the Spanish blunderbuss. We must have a machine like a steam-engine, with two horses to draw it, which shall tear devastatingly through a field of oats or wheat, cut ten feet wide of grain at a stroke, and lay it all ready for sheaving.” The advent of this “startling mechanical enterprise” would lead to the manufacture of an estimated 200,000 machines the following year, with one of the biggest beneficiaries of such land office business being the manufacturer of the Syracuse contest’s gold medal winner—the McCormick’s Reaper.