Inventor, Industrialist

Virginia Childhood. Cyrus Hall McCormick was born into a strict Presbyterian farming family in the Shenandoah Valley of western Virginia on 15 February 1809. Cyrus's grandfather moved to Rockbridge County from Pennsylvania during the American Revolution (in which he fought) and there settled the homestead that stayed in the McCormick family until the twentieth century. Cyrus's father, Robert, considered himself something of an inventor and had designed among other things a clover huller, a bellows for blacksmiths, and even a reaping machine. Cyrus, who grew up working the family farm and attending a rural school when time permitted, must have caught the mechanical bug from his father. By the time he was twenty-two, he had a U.S. patent to his credit for a hillside plow. But Cyrus used his own ideas when it came to designing and building his first reaper in...