Cyrus Hall McCormick: His Life and Work

by Herbert Newton Casson

When McCormick was a boy, more wheat was raised in Virginia than in any other State. But by 1860 Illinois was ahead, and by degrees the sceptre of the wheat empire passed westwards, until to-day it is held by Minnesota. What with the Homestead Act of 1862, and the offer of McCormick and the other Reaper manufacturers to sell machines to the farmers on credit, it was possible for poor men, without capital, to become each the owner of 160 acres of land, and to harvest its grain without spending a penny in wages. Thus the immense area of the West became a populous country, with cities and railways and State Governments, and producing one-tenth of the wheat of the world.

The enterprise of these Western farmers brought in the present era of farm machinery. It replaced "the man with the hoe" by the man with the self-binder and steel plow and steam thresher. It wiped out the old-time drudge of the soil from American farms, and put in his stead the new farmer, the business farmer, who works for a good living and a profit, and not for a bare existence. Such men as Oliver Dalrymple, of North Dakota, led the way by demonstrating what might be done by "bonanza farms." This doughty Scottish-American secured 30,000 acres of the Red River Valley in 1876, and put it all into wheat. It was such a wheat-field as never before had been seen in any country. The soil was turned with 150 gang plows, sown with 70 drills, and reaped with 150 self-binders. Twelve threshing-machines, kept busy in the midst of this sea of yellow grain, beat out the straw and chaff and in the season filled two freight trains a day with enough wheat in each train to give two thousand people their daily bread for a year.

Led on by such pathfinders, American farmers launched out bravely, until now they are using very nearly a billion dollars' worth of labor-saving machinery. The whole level of farm life has been raised. It has been lifted from muscle to mind. The use of machinery has created leisure and capital, and these two have begotten intelligence, education, science, so that the farmer of to-day lives in a new world, and is a wholly different person from what he was when Cyrus McCormick learned to till the soil.

This elevation of the farmer is now seen to be our best guarantee of prosperity and national permanence. It was the incoming flood of wheat money that put the United States on its feet as a manufacturing nation. The total amount of this money, from the building of the first McCormick Reaper factory until to-day, is the unthinkable sum of $5,500,000,000, which may be taken as the net profit of the Reaper to the nation.

Thus the Reaper was not, like the wind-mill, for instance, a mere convenience to the farmer himself. It was the link between the city and the country. It directly benefited all bread-eaters, and put the whole nation upon a higher plane. It built up cities, and made them safe, for the reason that they were not surrounded by hordes of sickle-and-flail serfs, who would sooner or later rise up in the throe of a hunger-revolution and pull down the cities and the palaces into oblivion. When the first Reaper was sold, in 1840, only eight per cent of Americans lived in towns and cities; and to-day the proportion is forty per cent. Yet bread is cheaper and more plentiful now than it was then; and there is the most genial and good-natured co-operation between those who live among paved streets and those who live in the midst of the green and yellow wheat-fields. There are no Goths and Vandals on American farms.

Instead of the tiny log workshop on the McCormick farm, in which the first crude Reaper was laboriously hammered and whittled into shape, there is now a McCormick City in the heart of Chicago—the oldest and largest harvester plant in the world. In sixty-two years of its life, this plant has produced five or six millions of harvesting machines, and it is still pouring them out at the rate of 7,000 a week. If it were to ship its yearly output at one time, it would require a railway caravan of 14,000 freight-cars to carry the machines from the factory to the farmers.

McCORMICK REAPER IN USE IN RUSSIA

This McCormick City is one of the industrial wonders that America exhibits to visiting foreigners, and it is so vast that it can only be glanced at in a day. It covers 229 acres of land. In its buildings there is enough flooring to cover a 90-acre farm, and if they were all made over into one long building, twenty-five feet wide and one story high, it would be very nearly forty miles long, as far as from Chicago to Joliet. The population of McCormick City, counting workers only, is 7,000, whose average wages are $2.20 a day.

Here you will find a mammoth twine-mill—the largest of its kind in any country. Into this mill come the bright yellow sisal fibres from Yucatan and the manila fibres from the Philippines. These fibres are cleaned and strewn upon endless chains of combs, which jerk and pull the fibres and finally deliver them to spindles—1,680 spindles, which whirl and twist 19,000 miles of twine in the course of a single day, almost enough to put a girdle around the earth. Most of this work is done by Polish girls and women, who are being displaced as farm laborers in their own country by American harvesting machines.