Cyrus McCormick
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40 free Cyrus McCormick trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Cyrus McCormick did not just build a machine that cut grain; he built the business that put it on farms around the world. Born on a Virginia farm in 1809, he turned his family's long-running experiment into a working reaper, then spent decades fighting rivals in the field and in court. This quiz covers the fun facts people look for: how the first reaper came together and who helped, the move to Chicago, the sales ideas that were new at the time, the famous names who crossed his path, and what became of his company and his children. It suits students working on an inventor report, teachers who want a quick class quiz, and anyone curious about how one harvest machine changed farming. Every answer comes with a short explanation.
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Q 01Which future president was hired to defend John Manny when Cyrus McCormick sued over reaper patents?
Abraham Lincoln
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.
Q 02Cyrus McCormick's daughter-in-law Katharine spent her fortune funding which 1950s medical advance?
The birth control pill
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.
Q 03Cyrus McCormick's son Harold married Edith, a daughter of which Gilded Age tycoon?
John D. Rockefeller
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.
Q 04The 1871 fire that destroyed Cyrus McCormick's Chicago factory was blamed, in legend, on whose cow?
Catherine O'Leary
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.
Q 05Cyrus McCormick won over cash-poor farmers by letting them buy his reapers in which way?
On credit
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.
Q 06Cyrus McCormick's reaper won a medal in 1851 at the Crystal Palace, a world's fair in which city?
London
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.
Q 07Cyrus McCormick's company merged with its rival Deering in 1902 to form which farm-machinery giant?
International Harvester
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.
Q 08Cyrus McCormick's reaper was the forerunner of which machine that cuts and threshes grain at once?
The combine
The combine is named for combining reaping, threshing and winnowing in a single pass. McCormick's reaper mechanized only the first of those jobs.
Q 09Cyrus McCormick's 1831 reaper cut grain to one side as it was pulled across the field by what?
A team of horses
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.
Q 10Before Cyrus McCormick's reaper, farmhands cut standing grain by hand with which long-handled tool?
A scythe
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.
Q 11Cyrus McCormick chose Chicago in 1847 partly because raw materials could come by water across what?
The Great Lakes
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.
Q 12Cyrus McCormick ran for Congress in Illinois in 1864 on a peace platform for which party?
Democratic
Democratic loyalties did not help him in wartime Chicago: he lost soundly to Republican 'Long John' Wentworth, a 6-foot-6 former mayor.
Q 13Cyrus McCormick was a devout member of which church, whose Chicago seminary took his name in 1886?
Presbyterian
Q 21Which rival patented a reaper in 1833, months before Cyrus McCormick, and fought him for decades?
Obed Hussey
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.
Q 22Which banker financed the 1902 merger that folded Cyrus McCormick's company into a farming giant?
J. P. Morgan
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.
Q 23Cyrus McCormick's grandnephew Robert, known as 'the Colonel', long published which Chicago daily?
The Tribune
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.
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.
Q 14Which enslaved man on the McCormick farm helped Cyrus McCormick develop the first reaper in 1831?
Jo Anderson
Jo Anderson aided Cyrus as the machine took shape, yet McCormick always insisted he was the reaper's single inventor.
Q 15What was the name of the Virginia farm where Cyrus McCormick was born and built his first reaper?
Walnut Grove
Walnut Grove stayed in the McCormick family until 1954 and became a National Historic Landmark, with eight of its nine original buildings preserved.
Q 16In which building on his family's Virginia farm did Cyrus McCormick build his first reapers?
The blacksmith shop
The blacksmith shop doubled as the factory: through the 1840s the family built and sold reapers there by hand before production moved to Chicago.
Q 17Cyrus McCormick's brother Leander paid for which kind of building at the University of Virginia?
An observatory
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.
Q 18Which nation's Academy of Sciences said Cyrus McCormick did more for farming than any living man?
France
France's Academy of Sciences elected him a corresponding member late in his life, after his reaper had collected prizes and medals across Europe.
Q 19A deadly 1886 clash between police and strikers at the McCormick reaper works led to which event?
The Haymarket affair
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.
Q 20Before his 1834 reaper patent, Cyrus McCormick patented a self-sharpening type of which farm tool?
A plow
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.
Q 24A South Carolina town is named for Cyrus McCormick, who bought what kind of mine there?
Gold
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.
Q 25Cyrus McCormick was born in 1809 on a farm in Rockbridge County, in which Virginia valley?
Shenandoah
Shenandoah fields were not where his future lay: orders soon arrived from farther west, where farms were larger and the land flatter.
Q 26Which university runs Cyrus McCormick's boyhood farm as a free museum and research station?
Virginia Tech
Virginia Tech was given the farm by the McCormick family in 1954 and uses part of the land as an experimental farm.
Q 27After fire destroyed the McCormick reaper factory in 1871, who insisted it be rebuilt even larger?
His wife, Nettie
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.
Q 28Which novelist based 1998's Riven Rock on the life of Cyrus McCormick's youngest son, Stanley?
T. C. Boyle
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.
Q 29Cyrus McCormick's daughter Anita wed a son of which Secretary of State, the 1884 Republican nominee?
James G. Blaine
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.
Q 30Cyrus McCormick Jr. locked out workers in 1886 under the guard of 300 armed men from which force?
The Pinkertons
The Pinkertons guarded the non-union replacements he brought in, a year after strikers had forced him to restore a 15 percent wage cut.