THE McCORMICK HOME
IF we wish to solve the riddle of the Reaper,--to know why it was not
invented in any of the older nations that rose to greatness and perished
in so many instances for lack of bread,--we can find the key to the
answer in the home and the ancestry of the McCormicks. We shall see that
the family into which he was born represented in the highest degree that
new species of farmer,--self-reliant, studious, enterprising, and
inventive,--which was developed in the pioneer period of American
history.
Robert McCormick, the father of Cyrus, was in his most prosperous days
the owner of four farms, having in all 1,800 acres. But his acres were
only one-half of his interests. He owned as well two grist-mills, two
sawmills, a smelting-furnace, a distillery, and a blacksmith-shop. He
did much more than till the soil. He hammered iron and shaped wood, and
did both well, as those can testify who have seen an iron crane and
walnut cabinet that were made by his hands. More than this, he invented
new types of farm machinery,--a hemp-brake, a clover huller, a bellows,
and a threshing-machine.
The little log workshop still stands where Robert McCormick and his sons
hammered and tinkered on rainy days. It is about twenty-four feet
square, with an uneven floor, and a heavy door that was hung in place by
home-made nails and home-made hinges. There was a forge on either side
of the chimney, so that two men could work at the same time; and one
small rusted anvil is all that now remains of its equipment.
[Illustration: OLD BLACKSMITH SHOP ON WALNUT GROVE FARM, VIRGINIA
In this shop the first practical reaping machine was built by Cyrus Hall
McCormick in 1831]
As for the McCormick homestead itself, there were so many manufacturing
activities in it that it was literally half a home and half a factory.
Shoes were cobbled, cotton, flax, and wool were spun into yarn, woven
into cloth, and fashioned into clothes for the whole family. The
stockings and mitts and caps were all home-made, and so was the cradle
in which the eight children were rocked. What with the moulding of
candles, and sewing of carpet-rags, and curing of hams, and boiling
of soap, and drying of herbs, and stringing of apples, the McCormick
home was practically a school of many trades for the people who lived
under its roof.
Robert McCormick was an educated man. He was not at all like the poor
serfs who tilled the soil of Europe. He belonged to the same general
class as those other eminent farmers,--Washington, Jefferson, Adams,
Webster, and Clay. He was a reader of deep books and a student of
astronomy. Lawyers and clergymen would frequently drive to his house to
consult with him. And in mechanical pursuits he had an unusual degree of
skill, having been born the son of a weaver and accustomed from babyhood
to the use of machinery.
He was a gentle, reflective man, with a genius for self-reliance in any
great or little emergency. When a new stone church was built, and he
found that his pew was so dark that he could not see to read the hymns,
he promptly cut a small window in the wall,--a peculiarity which is
still pointed out to visitors. On another occasion, with this same
spirit of resourcefulness, he drove the spectre of yellow fever from
the home. This dreaded disease was gathering in a full harvest in the
farm-houses of the county. It had cut down three of Mrs. McCormick's
family,--her father, mother, and brother,--and had swung its fatal
scythe toward the boy Cyrus, who was then five years of age. When the
doctor was called, he insisted that the child should be bled. "But you
bled all the others, and they died," said Robert McCormick quietly;
"I'll have no more bleedings." No remedy for yellow fever, except
bleeding, was known to the doctors of a century ago, so Robert McCormick
at once invented a remedy. He devised a treatment of hot baths, hot
teas, and bitter herbs; and Cyrus was rescued from the fever and
restored to perfect health.
Such a man as Robert McCormick would have been practically impossible in
any other country at that time. There, in that isolated hollow of the
Virginian mountains, he was a citizen of a free country. His vote had
helped to make Thomas Jefferson President. He was a proprietor, not a
serf nor a tenant. He was not compelled to divide up every cord of wood
and bushel of wheat with a king or a landlord. Whatever he earned was
his own. He was an American; and thus, in the endless chain of cause and
effect, we can trace the origin of the Reaper back, if we wish, to
George Washington and Christopher Columbus.
The whole spirit of the young republic pushed towards the invention of
labor-saving machinery,--towards replacing the hoe with the steel plow,
the needle with the sewing-machine, the puddling-furnace with the
Bessemer converter, the sickle with the Reaper. And it is fair to say
that the social forces that represented the American spirit were focused
to a remarkable degree in the home in which Cyrus H. McCormick had his
birth and his education.
There was another contributing influence, too, in the making of
McCormick,--the fact that the blood of his father and mother came to him
in a pure strain of Scotch-Irish. It was this inheritance that endowed
him with the tenacity and unconquerable resiliency that enabled him not
only to invent a new machine, but to create a new industry and hold
fast to it against all comers.
The Scotch-Irish! The full story of what the United States owes to this
fire-hardened race has never yet been told,--it is a tale that will some
day be expanded into a fascinating volume of American history. It is not
possible to understand either the character or the success of McCormick
without knowing the Scotch-Irish influences that shaped him.
The one man who did more to launch the Scotch-Irish on their conquering
way, so it appears, was John Knox. This preacher-statesman, "who never
feared the face of man," forced Queen Mary from her throne, and
established self-government and a pure religion in Scotland, about
seventy-five years after the discovery of America. This brought English
armies down upon the Scotch, and for very nearly two centuries the
struggle was bitter and desperate, the Scotch refusing to compromise or
to bate one jot or tittle of a covenant which many of them had signed
with their blood.
[Illustration: THE OLD McCORMICK HOMESTEAD, WALNUT GROVE FARM,
ROCKBRIDGE COUNTY, VIRGINIA]
At the height of this conflict, about 300,000 of these Scotch
Covenanters left their ravaged country and set out in a fleet of little
vessels for the north of Ireland. Here they settled in the barren and
boggy province of Ulster, and presto! in the course of two generations
Ulster became the most prosperous, moral, and intelligent section of the
British empire. Its people were, beyond a doubt, the best educated
masses of that period, either in Great Britain or anywhere else. They
were the most skilful of farmers. They wove woollen cloth and the finest
of linen. They built schools and churches and factories. But in 1698,
the English Parliament, jealous of such progressiveness, passed laws
against their manufacturing, and Ulster was overrun, as Scotland had
been, with the police and the soldiery of England.
The Scotch-Irish fought, of course, even against such odds. They had
never learned how to submit. But as the devastation of Ulster continued,
they resolved to do as their great-grandfathers had done,--emigrate to a
new country. They had heard good reports of America, through several of
their leaders who had been banished there by the British government. So
they packed up their movable property, and set out across the wide
uncharted Atlantic Ocean in an exodus for liberty of industry and
liberty of conscience.
By the year 1776 there were more than 500,000 of the Scotch-Irish in
this country. They went first across the Alleghanies, into the new lands
of western Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Texas. Beyond all
question, they were the hardiest and ablest founders of the republic.
They dissolved the rule of the Cavaliers in Virginia; and in the little
hamlet of Mecklenburg they planned the first defiance of Great Britain
and struck the key-note of the Revolution. They gave Washington
thirty-nine of his generals, three out of four members of his cabinet,
and three out of five judges of the first Supreme Court.
Of all classes of settlers in the thirteen colonies, they were the best
prepared and most willing for the struggle with England, for the reason
that they had begun to fight for liberty two hundred and fifty years
before the battle of Bunker Hill. They were not amateurs in the work of
revolution. They were veterans. And so, because they were pioneers and
patriots by nature and inheritance, the Scotch-Irish became, in the
words of John Fiske, "the main strength of our American democracy."
Naturally, they were pathfinders in industry as well as in the matter of
self-government, as many of them had been manufacturers in Ireland.
"Thousands of the best manufacturers and weavers in Ulster went to seek
their bread in America," writes Froude, "and they carried their art and
their tools with them." In one instance, by the failure of the woollen
trade, 20,000 of them were driven to the United States. As might have
been expected, these Scotch-Irish Americans have produced not only five
of our Presidents, but also such merchants as A. T. Stewart; such
publishers as Harper, Bonner, Scribner, and McClurg; and such inventors
as Joseph Henry, Morse, Fulton, and McCormick. They were possibly the
first large body of people who had ever been driven from manufacturing
into farming; and it was not at all surprising, therefore, that the new
profession of making farm machinery should have been born upon a
Scotch-Irish farm.
As for Cyrus H. McCormick, he represented the fourth generation of
American McCormicks. His great-grandfather, Thomas McCormick, quit
Ulster in the troublous days of 1735. He was a soldier at Londonderry;
and later became noted as an Indian fighter in Pennsylvania. His son
Robert, who moved south to Virginia, carried a rifle for American
independence at the battle of Guilford Court-house, North Carolina, in
1781. He was a farmer and weaver by occupation, a typical Ulsterman,
whose farm was a busy workshop of invention and manufacturing.
[Illustration: ROBERT McCORMICK]
On his mother's side, too, Cyrus McCormick had behind him a line of
battling Scotch-Irish. She was the daughter of a Virginian farmer named
Patrick Hall, one of whose forefathers had been driven out of Armagh by
the massacre of 1641. Patrick Hall was the leader of the old-school
Presbyterians in his region of Virginia. So rigid was he in his loyalty
to the faith of the Covenanters, that once when a new minister came
to preach in the little kirk, and lined out a Watts hymn instead of a
psalm of David, Patrick Hall picked up his hat and strode out, followed
by a goodly part of the congregation. He at once built upon his own farm
a new church of limestone, in which no such levity as hymn-singing was
permitted.
Cyrus McCormick's mother inherited her father's strength of character,
without his severity. She was a thorough Celt, impulsive, free-spoken,
and highly imaginative. Judging from the stories about her that are
remembered in the neighborhood, it is evident that she was a woman of
exceptional quality of mind. She was not as studious as her husband, but
quicker and more ambitious. As a girl, she had been strikingly handsome,
with a tall and commanding figure. She was saving and shrewd, with the
Scotch-Irish passion for "getting ahead." She allowed no idle moments in
the home. If the children were dressed before breakfast was ready, out
they went to cut wood or weed the garden. She knew the profession of
housekeeping in all its old-fashioned complexity; and she worked at it
from dawn to starlight, with no rest except the relief of flitting from
one task to another.
"Mrs. McCormick came riding by our farm one day," said an aged neighbor,
"at a time when my father and mother were hurrying to save some hay from
a coming rain-storm. 'If you don't hurry up you'll be too late,' she
said; and then tying her horse to the fence she picked up a rake and
helped with the hay until it was all in the barn. That's the kind of
woman she was,--always full of energy and ready to help."
[Illustration: MRS. MARY ANN HALL McCORMICK]
But Mrs. McCormick was much more than industrious. She had a fine pride
in the ownership of beautiful things,--flowers and handsome clothes and
silverware and mahogany furniture. Her flock of peacocks was one of the
sights of the county; and in her later life, when she was for ten years
the sole manager of the farm, she was accustomed to drive about in a
wonderful carriage with folding steps, drawn by prancing horses and
driven by a stately colored coachman,--an equipage of so much style
and grandeur that it is still remembered by the neighbors. "She loved to
drive fast," said one old lady; "and I was much impressed as a little
girl with the startling way in which her horses would come clattering
and dancing up to the door."
Thus there was in the McCormick home the spiritual and imaginative
element that was vital to the development of a man whose whole life was
a battle against the prejudices and "impossibilities" of the world.
Cyrus McCormick was predestined, we may legitimately say, by the
conditions of his birth, to accomplish his great work. From his father
he had a specific training as an inventor; from his mother he had
executive ability and ambition; from his Scotch-Irish ancestry he had
the dogged tenacity that defied defeat; and from the wheat-fields that
environed his home came the call for the Reaper, to lighten the heavy
drudgery of the harvest.