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8 THE PRESBYTERI^
CENTENNIAL ANNIVERSARY OF THE BIRTH
OF CYRUS H. McCORMICK.
By Rev. W. W. Moore, D. D.
On the fifteenth of February, 1809, an epoch-maker
was born in Rockbridge county, Virginia, Cyrus Hall
McCormick by name. He was of Scotch-Irish descent
and received the old-fashioned, wholesome, charactermaking
Presbyterian training. Wlren only fifteen
years old, he made a grain-cradle for his own use in
the harvest field and swung it over many a broad acre
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,?rvttjjing ins piacc among tne lull-grown
hands on his father's farm. That boy was destined to
release millions of his fellowmen from the severe toil,
of which he then had a practical experience, by inventing
a machine for cutting grain by horsepower and to
link his name for all time with three great departments
of human interest, industry, education and religion?
by the liberal and judicious use of the large wealth
which came to him through his beneficent invention.
In 1816, iust seven vears aftpr hp hnri
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cradle for his boyish strength, Cyrus McCormick produced
the first successful reaping machine, fashioning
with his own hands every part of it, both in wood and
iron, in the carpenter and blacksmith shops on his
father's farm. It consisted of a vibrating blade to cut,
a platform to receive the falling grain, and a reel to
bring- the standbier orrain a.
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The reaper was tested in a field of six acres of oats,
near Walnut Grove, the McCormick homestead, midway
between Lexington and Staunton, and astonished
all who witnessed its work. But none of those then
present, not even the young inventor himself, however
far-seeing and sanguine, could have foretold all the
vast consequences which were to flow from that triumph
of his genius. For, not only has it revolutionized
the whole method of farming in the areas then
cultivated, but it has opened the mighty empire of the
northwest, by making possible its enormous crops of
grain, and thus stimulating the construction of thousands
of miles of railway, and peopling half a continent
with pro*speroits settlers.
The reaper has benefited in the same way South
America, New Zealand, Australia, Great Britain,
r ranee, Kussia and other countries of the world.
Cyrus H. McCormick was the eldest of eight children,
six of whom lived to grow up. His father, Robert
McCormick, in addition to farming, had workshops
of considerable importance on his farm, as well as a
saw mill, a grist mill and smelting furnaces, and was
himself an inventor, having devised and built a thresher,
a hemp-breaker, various mill improvements, and
having even made some beginnings on a mechanical
reaper, which hdwever was not a success. It remained
for his son to discover and apply the true principle
of the reaper which was to revolutionize the grain harvests
of the world. As already stated, he turned out
the first machine in 1831, but it was only after the disastrous
panic of 1837 that he began in earnest the
manufacture and sale of the machines in company with
his father and his two brothers, William and Leander.
The first eOnRtffnm^rif c??->fr * -?
j-> -"-in iu me western prairies in
1844 was taken in wagons from Walnut Grove to
lN OF THE SOUTH. March 3, 1909.
Scottsville, then down the James River Canal to Richmond,
thence by water to New Orleans and then up
the Mississippi and Ohio rivers to Cincinnati. As the
west, with its vast prairies, was the natural market for
the reaper, Mr. McCormick in the fall of the same year
(1844) went to Cincinnati and began manufacturing
there. Seeing in a short time that Chicago was the
best center for the reaper business, he moved to that
city in 1846.
The machine was first brought to the attention of the
British public at the World's Fair in London, in 1851.
At first it was the subject of some ridicule: the London
Times called it "a cross between an Astley (circus)
chariot, a wheelbarrow, and a flying machine." But in
a few weeks, when, after prolonged tests, the Great
Council medal was awarded the inventor, "the Thunderer"
changed front completely and admitted that the
McCormick reaper was equal in value to the entire cost
of the exhibition. In 1867, at the exposition in Paris,
Mr. McCormick was decorated by the Emperor of
Trance with the Cross of the Legion of Honor for his
valuable and successful invention. In 1878, when he
was called to Paris for the third time to receive the
Grand Prize of the Exposition, he was elected a corresponding
member of the French Academy of
Sciences, "as having done more for the cause of agriculture
than any other living man." In the language
of the faculty of Washington and Lee University, "It
is not too much to say that no man in all history has
achieved so much for'the progress of that branch of
ministry wnicn is universally recognized as the basis
of individual comfort and national prosperity."
We have given with some fullness these facts in regard
to Mr. McCormick's influence upon the material
interests of mankind for the purpose of emphasizing
the statement, paradoxical as it may appear, that his
influence upon the higher interests of the race was still
greater and more beneficent. He did not think more
of machines than of souls. For fifty years he was a
consistent, earnest, fruitful member of the Presbyterian
Church, and from the earliest days of his prosperity
to the end of his honored life, he was the large-hearted
and open-handed friend of educational and religious
inctitntinne *? 1?1 - *' '
v.vv.i itciuj iu ncip mem witn His sympathy,
his prayers, his counsel and his means. In every
part of the country, north, south, east and west,"
there are churches, academies, colleges and seminaries
which today are flourishing and doing a great work for
God, because of the timely and generous assistance he
gave them in their days of poverty and struggle. He
never ceased to love his native state Twr. /-?f ? .?
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erable and useful institutions held specially warm place
in his heart: Washington and Lee University in his
native county, and Union Theological Seminary. It is
well known that he gave to the former a handsome
sum, and that in 1866, when our seminary seemed
doomed because of financial losses by the war, he gave
$30,000 for the endowment of the chair of Hebrew and
the Interpretation of the Old Testament. Had it not
been for the liberality of Cyrus II. McCormick in those
dark days, Union Seminary would not have been able
to do for the Church, at least on the same scale, the