Cyrus Hall McCormick: His Life and Work

CORMIC

or 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

rist-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 wh

t 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 eit

HOP ON WALNUT GR

al reaping machine was built b

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,

mers,-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

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.

s 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. Wh

edle 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 fo

ame to him in a pure strain of Scotch-Irish. It was this inheritance that endowed him with the tenacity and unconquerable res

it is a tale that will some day be expanded into a fascinating volume of American history. It is not possible to und

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 f

AD, WALNUT GROVE FARM, RO

ns 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 a

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

ll 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 G

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, b

n 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

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

T McC

ick 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

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

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

ANN HALL

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 sty

cCormick 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 a