McCormick Reaper (1831): Mechanising the American Grain Harvest

The McCormick reaper was a horse-drawn machine for cutting grain, first demonstrated by Cyrus Hall McCormick in July 1831 near Steele’s Tavern in Rockbridge County, Virginia. It replaced slow and exhausting hand harvesting with sickles and cradles, and in the decades after 1840 it helped farmers bring the vast grasslands of the American Midwest under wheat.

Background: the harvest bottleneck

In the early 19th century grain was still harvested much as it had been for centuries. Workers cut wheat with a sickle or a scythe fitted with a wooden “cradle” that gathered the stalks. Ripe grain had to be cut within a short window of a week or two before it shed its seed or was spoiled by weather, so the amount a farmer could grow was limited by how much his household and hired hands could cut in that time.

Inventors on both sides of the Atlantic had tried to solve the problem. In Scotland, the Reverend Patrick Bell built a working reaper in the 1820s, and many American patents for reaping machines were filed before 1830.

How the reaper was developed

Cyrus McCormick (1809–1884) grew up on Walnut Grove, his family’s farm in the Shenandoah Valley. His father, Robert McCormick, had worked for years on a reaping machine without success. In 1831 Cyrus built a new design, and Jo Anderson, an enslaved man on the farm, worked alongside him; Anderson’s part is now acknowledged by historians and at the Walnut Grove site.

The machine combined several features that became standard:

• a straight cutting blade that moved rapidly back and forth, cutting stalks against fixed fingers or guards;
• a revolving reel that pushed the standing grain towards the blade;
• a platform that caught the cut stalks, from which a worker raked them off in bundles;
• a divider at the outer end that separated the grain to be cut from the rest of the field;
• a main wheel that carried the machine’s weight and drove the blade and reel.

The horse walked beside the uncut grain, pulling the machine from the side so that it did not trample the crop.

Rivalry with Obed Hussey

McCormick did not patent his machine until 21 June 1834. By then Obed Hussey (1792–1860), a former sailor from Maine working in Ohio, had already received a patent for his own reaper on 31 December 1833. Hussey’s machine had a well-designed cutting bar that later proved especially good for mowing grass.

The two men competed fiercely for decades, staging field trials against each other in different states, publishing rival claims in farming newspapers and fighting in court and before the Patent Office over who had invented what. Both drew on ideas already in circulation, and historians generally see the reaper as a gradual development rather than the work of a single inventor.

From Virginia to Chicago

Sales were slow at first. McCormick sold few machines until the early 1840s, partly because of design problems and partly because the hilly farms of Virginia were not well suited to it. The flat, open prairies of the Midwest offered a far better market, and in 1847 he moved production to Chicago, then a fast-growing town linked to the farming country by lakes and, soon, railways.

McCormick proved a skilled businessman. He sold machines through local agents, offered credit so farmers could pay over time after the harvest, gave written guarantees and advertised heavily. At the Great Exhibition in London in 1851 his reaper won a Council Medal after successful field trials, boosting his reputation in Europe.

The reaper was also the subject of a famous patent case, McCormick v. Manny, in the mid-1850s. A young Illinois lawyer, Abraham Lincoln, was hired for the defence but was sidelined by the leading counsel, Edwin Stanton, who later became his Secretary of War. McCormick lost the case.

Impact on American farming

A reaper with a driver and a few workers to rake and bind could cut around 10 to 12 acres of wheat a day, several times what the same number of people could do by hand. Farmers could therefore plant much larger areas. Mechanised harvesting supported the westward spread of wheat farming, which was helped further by the Homestead Act of 1862 and by railways that carried grain to eastern cities and ports. In later decades American wheat became a major export to Europe, especially to Britain, which had opened its market to foreign grain with the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846.

During the American Civil War, when many farm workers joined the armies, reapers allowed Northern farms to keep harvesting large crops. Later machines bound the sheaves automatically, and eventually combine harvesters joined reaping and threshing in a single machine.

The McCormick factory was destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 and rebuilt on a larger scale. In 1902 the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company merged with the Deering company and others to form International Harvester.

Timeline

• 1820s: Patrick Bell builds a reaper in Scotland; Robert McCormick experiments in Virginia.
• 1831, July: Cyrus McCormick demonstrates his reaper near Steele’s Tavern, Virginia.
• 1833, 31 December: Obed Hussey receives a US patent for his reaper.
• 1834, 21 June: McCormick receives his patent.
• 1847: McCormick moves manufacturing to Chicago.
• 1851: The reaper wins a Council Medal at the Great Exhibition in London.
• 1871, October: The Chicago factory burns in the Great Chicago Fire.
• 1902: The company becomes part of International Harvester.

Why it matters

The mechanical reaper removed one of the oldest limits on farming: how much grain human hands could cut in a few weeks. It made large-scale wheat farming on the North American prairies practical, freed labour for cities and industry, and was one of the first steps in the mechanisation that now lets a small share of the population feed everyone else.