![]() On my second Chasing Abraham Lincoln tour I made an unplanned stop at the McCormick Farm, now part of the Shenandoah Valley Agricultural Research and Extension Center.Īs populations grew the need for improved crop yields increased, and the mechanical reaper made that possible. 2014 issue.One of Abraham Lincoln’s most famous cases is one in which he never actually tried. The story above is an excerpt from our Sept./Oct. Cyrus McCormick successfully demonstrated the new version later that year. In fact Robert conducted a fair bit of work on his own mechanical reaper before giving up and turning it over in 1831 to Cyrus and Jo Anderson, a slave who was brought up as his companion. His father Robert invented things too, tinkering constantly in his blacksmith’s shop. They grew lots of different crops and kept on their farms lots of different livestock.The idea is that they’re trying to be self-sufficient, if not at the individual household level, then at least at the neighborhood level.”Ĭyrus came in the fourth generation of American McCormicks. “Their agriculture is what we call general mixed farming. “All these people were streaming into the valley bringing culture with them, and that includes agriculture,” says Kenneth Koons, history professor at Virginia Military Institute. McCormick’s family came from the Irish province of Ulster, joining the great wave of Scots Irish landing at Philadelphia and then traveling down the Great Wagon Road to the Valley of Virginia and points south. He was born in 1809, the year the presidency passed from Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, from one Virginian to another. as a world power, contributed to the emergence of Chicago as a major city, pioneered business practices that today are standard protocol, and influenced the outcome of the Civil War. He revolutionized agriculture worldwide, drove the growth of the U.S. ![]() McCormick did much more than invent a farm tool. “It changed the world in many many ways.” ![]() “It is not an exaggeration to say that the invention of the reaper there in 1831 was the beginning of the agricultural industrial revolution,” says Jay Gilliam, who lives near Walnut Grove in Raphine, Virginia, and who has researched McCormick. In one of his first field exhibitions of the reaper, McCormick harvested six acres in an afternoon. With a sickle, a person could harvest about half an acre of grain in a day. Farmers have only a small window – 10 days or so – in which to harvest their grain for the year. It represented the first major advance in grain-harvesting technology since the scythe came along to supplement the sickle. His invention of the reaper dramatically changed food production around the world. The rolling hills and valleys of western Virginia today feel far removed from large-scale industrial agriculture.īut in the mid-19th century the region contributed heavily to feeding the still-new United States of America, serving as the highest grain-producing region in one of the highest grain-producing states.Īnd, the Valley of Virginia produced in that era a man who would forever leave a mark on American agriculture and business in general: Cyrus McCormick. The scene is a re-creation of the first reaper test. This production still is from the 1937 Fox Hearst film “Romance of the Reaper,” which was produced by International Harvester to celebrate the McCormick reaper’s centennial. ![]()
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