40 Fun Facts About Cyrus McCormick

Which future president was hired to defend John Manny when Cyrus McCormick sued over reaper patents?

Abraham Lincoln was born just three days before McCormick, in February 1809. Manny's team hired him as local counsel, then shut him out and never let him speak in court.

Cyrus McCormick's daughter-in-law Katharine spent her fortune funding which 1950s medical advance?

The birth control pill was developed with about $2 million of her own money. Decades earlier she had smuggled more than 1,000 diaphragms out of Europe for Margaret Sanger's clinic.

Cyrus McCormick's son Harold married Edith, a daughter of which Gilded Age tycoon?

John D. Rockefeller gained a reaper heir as a son-in-law in 1895. Edith was later treated by Carl Jung and became a Jungian analyst herself.

The 1871 fire that destroyed Cyrus McCormick's Chicago factory was blamed, in legend, on whose cow?

Catherine O'Leary was formally cleared by the Chicago City Council in 1997. The blaze was real enough: it destroyed McCormick's plant and 2,000 finished machines.

Cyrus McCormick won over cash-poor farmers by letting them buy his reapers in which way?

On credit was his answer to the harvest calendar: better that he wait for the money, he said, than that a farmer wait for a machine he needed.

Cyrus McCormick's reaper won a medal in 1851 at the Crystal Palace, a world's fair in which city?

London made the reaper a sensation abroad after it cut a green, unripe field where a rival machine failed. One description called it a cross between a wheelbarrow, a chariot and a flying machine.

Cyrus McCormick's company merged with its rival Deering in 1902 to form which farm-machinery giant?

International Harvester was born as the fourth-largest corporation in the United States, and two of Cyrus's sons presided over it for its first 40 years.

Cyrus McCormick's reaper was the forerunner of which machine that cuts and threshes grain at once?

The combine is named for combining reaping, threshing and winnowing in a single pass. McCormick's reaper mechanized only the first of those jobs.

Cyrus McCormick's 1831 reaper cut grain to one side as it was pulled across the field by what?

A team of horses walked beside the standing grain rather than through it, which set his machine apart from an earlier design that was pushed from behind.

Before Cyrus McCormick's reaper, farmhands cut standing grain by hand with which long-handled tool?

A scythe was so slow that even farmers with land and seed to spare planted only what they could cut in the short harvest season.

Cyrus McCormick chose Chicago in 1847 partly because raw materials could come by water across what?

The Great Lakes brought his raw materials in from the east, while the railroads carried finished reapers west to the prairie farms where most of his customers were.

Cyrus McCormick ran for Congress in Illinois in 1864 on a peace platform for which party?

Democratic loyalties did not help him in wartime Chicago: he lost soundly to Republican 'Long John' Wentworth, a 6-foot-6 former mayor.

Cyrus McCormick was a devout member of which church, whose Chicago seminary took his name in 1886?

Presbyterian causes drew much of his giving: he endowed four professorships at the Chicago seminary, which was renamed for him two years after his death.

Which enslaved man on the McCormick farm helped Cyrus McCormick develop the first reaper in 1831?

Jo Anderson aided Cyrus as the machine took shape, yet McCormick always insisted he was the reaper's single inventor.

What was the name of the Virginia farm where Cyrus McCormick was born and built his first reaper?

Walnut Grove stayed in the McCormick family until 1954 and became a National Historic Landmark, with eight of its nine original buildings preserved.

In which building on his family's Virginia farm did Cyrus McCormick build his first reapers?

The blacksmith shop doubled as the factory: through the 1840s the family built and sold reapers there by hand before production moved to Chicago.

Cyrus McCormick's brother Leander paid for which kind of building at the University of Virginia?

An observatory was his gift to his home state: it opened in 1885 with a 26-inch telescope that matched the largest in the United States.

Which nation's Academy of Sciences said Cyrus McCormick did more for farming than any living man?

France's Academy of Sciences elected him a corresponding member late in his life, after his reaper had collected prizes and medals across Europe.

A deadly 1886 clash between police and strikers at the McCormick reaper works led to which event?

The Haymarket affair began as a protest rally called the day after police shot strikers at the plant, which was then run by Cyrus McCormick Jr.

Before his 1834 reaper patent, Cyrus McCormick patented a self-sharpening type of which farm tool?

A plow earned him a patent before the reaper did. The reaper itself found no buyers at first, because it could not yet cope with varying field conditions.

Which rival patented a reaper in 1833, months before Cyrus McCormick, and fought him for decades?

Obed Hussey got his patent about six months ahead of McCormick, and their 'war of the reapers' ran for more than a quarter of a century.

Which banker financed the 1902 merger that folded Cyrus McCormick's company into a farming giant?

J. P. Morgan sent his partner George Perkins to broker the deal, which united the five largest reaper makers and ended years of ruinous lawsuits.

Cyrus McCormick's grandnephew Robert, known as 'the Colonel', long published which Chicago daily?

The Tribune came to him through his mother's side: her father was its editor Joseph Medill, so the Colonel united two of the city's leading dynasties.

A South Carolina town is named for Cyrus McCormick, who bought what kind of mine there?

Gold never repaid the $20,000 he spent on the mines, but he laid out the town in orderly lots and helped bring it a railroad.

Cyrus McCormick was born in 1809 on a farm in Rockbridge County, in which Virginia valley?

Shenandoah fields were not where his future lay: orders soon arrived from farther west, where farms were larger and the land flatter.

Which university runs Cyrus McCormick's boyhood farm as a free museum and research station?

Virginia Tech was given the farm by the McCormick family in 1954 and uses part of the land as an experimental farm.

After fire destroyed the McCormick reaper factory in 1871, who insisted it be rebuilt even larger?

His wife, Nettie, 26 years his junior, was his trusted financial adviser. After his death she gave away about $8 million to schools, hospitals and churches.

Which novelist based 1998's Riven Rock on the life of Cyrus McCormick's youngest son, Stanley?

T. C. Boyle took the title from the California estate where Stanley, who had schizophrenia, was moved in 1908; Katharine McCormick is a character in the book.

Cyrus McCormick's daughter Anita wed a son of which Secretary of State, the 1884 Republican nominee?

James G. Blaine narrowly lost that election to Grover Cleveland. Anita went on to fund progressive education in Chicago, including the Francis W. Parker School.

Cyrus McCormick Jr. locked out workers in 1886 under the guard of 300 armed men from which force?

The Pinkertons guarded the non-union replacements he brought in, a year after strikers had forced him to restore a 15 percent wage cut.

Before Cyrus McCormick, minister Patrick Bell built an unpatented 1820s reaper in which country?

Scotland's Reverend Bell sought no patent, believing his machine should benefit all mankind, and never made any money from it.

Long after Cyrus McCormick died, his name was carried by which tractor line launched in 1924?

Farmall tractors were badged McCormick-Deering and later simply McCormick, because farmers trusted the names from the early days of farm machinery.

Where did Cyrus McCormick, born in 1809, rank in age among his parents' eight children?

The eldest of eight, Cyrus was the assertive, business-minded child, and his mother urged his father to hand him the unfinished reaper.

In 2002 Virginia scientists named a new variety of which crop after Cyrus McCormick's family?

Wheat was the fitting choice: the soft red winter variety honors the father and sons whose reaper transformed the grain harvest.

Cyrus McCormick's 1855 'Reaper Case' against John Manny was moved from Chicago to which Ohio city?

Cincinnati is where Edwin Stanton, later Secretary of War, argued for Manny's winning defense; McCormick appealed to the Supreme Court and lost again.

Cyrus McCormick was a trustee of which Virginia university, where a statue of him stands?

Washington and Lee, in Lexington near his birthplace, had him on its board for the last 20 years of his life.

Cyrus McCormick first had his reapers mass-produced under contract at a factory in Brockport, in which state?

New York's Brockport plant, on the Erie Canal, was his first step beyond the family workshop: he heard about it on the trip to collect his 1845 patent.

In 1940 Cyrus McCormick joined Eli Whitney and Samuel Morse in a 'Famous Americans' series of what?

Postage stamps in the 1940 series grouped him with four other inventors, among them Elias Howe and Alexander Graham Bell; McCormick's was the 3-cent stamp.

Which state's historical society, far from his Virginia birthplace, holds Cyrus McCormick's papers?

Wisconsin holds the McCormick family and company papers in Madison, though he was born in Virginia and made his fortune in Chicago.

By the 1880s Cyrus McCormick was selling reapers as far away as Russia and which Pacific nation?

New Zealand and Russia show how far he pushed overseas after the 1871 fire, when he rebuilt with a bigger factory and chased foreign markets in earnest.