Cyrus McCormick: Joe Anderson's Reaper, a Lincoln Defeat and Haymarket

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Cyrus McCormick was born in Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains in 1809 to Robert McCormick Jr., who spent 28 years failing to build a reliable horse-drawn reaper. Working beside Joe Anderson, a man enslaved on the family plantation, Cyrus produced a working design in 18 months by pairing a reciprocating blade with a revolving reel, demonstrated it at Steele's Tavern in 1831 and patented it in 1834. Sales were dismal: one machine in 1840 and none in 1841. After the Panic of 1837 nearly bankrupted the family, he recognized the flat Midwest as his market, and in 1847 he and his brother Leander moved manufacturing to Chicago.

When the Patent Office refused to extend his patent in 1848, citing Obed Hussey and William Manning, McCormick built a business moat instead: field agents, head-to-head cutting contests and a spare parts network for harvest season. He won a Council Medal at London's Crystal Palace in 1851, then lost his 1855 suit against John H. Manny, whose defense team included Abraham Lincoln. A Democrat who ran for Congress in 1864 on a peace platform and lost, he rebuilt after the 1871 Chicago Fire and died in 1884. Two years later, strikes at his plant fed into the Haymarket riot.

He married 23-year-old Nancy "Nettie" Fowler in 1858, when he was 49, and they had seven children.
His son Stanley's psychiatric illness later inspired T.C. Boyle's novel Riven Rock.
He modified Emanuel Leutze's painting Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way to feature his reapers.
Leander forced a company name change in 1879 to credit their father's role.
In 1902 Cyrus Jr., backed by J.P. Morgan, merged rivals into International Harvester.

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