They manufactured 500 mechanical reapers there in 1848.Ĭompetitors. McCormick realized that a factory in the Midwest could significantly increase sales, so in 1847 he and a partner built a factory in Chicago. ![]() ![]() Between his own workshop in Virginia and some contractors in Cincinnati, Ohio, McCormick turned out 150 reapers in 1845. Although Cyrus McCormick left the farm machine business for a few years, his reaper, which would come to transform agriculture in the Trans Appalachian West, hit the market in 1840. After making improvements, the younger McCormick patented his new reaper in 1834. Robert McCormick experimented with a reaper and gave it to his son, Cyrus, in 1831. Early mechanical reapers appeared in England around 1800, and inventors in Europe and the United States continued to explore new possibilities. Cyrus Hall McCormick was born in Virginia in 1809 his father, Robert, was something of a tinkerer himself. Farmers growing small grains such as wheat still needed laborers to harvest with sickles, scythes, or larger hand implements called cradles. These new plows allowed the settler to slice into mile after mile of otherwise resilient Midwestern prairie, but even Deere ’s plows could not overcome the problem of finding sufficient labor at harvest time. He annually manufactured one thousand plows by the mid 1840s and ten thousand a year the following decade. In 1837 John Deere constructed his first iron plow with a steel edge. Iron and steel plows soon replaced those made of wood. Farm production and efficiency grew rapidly, a crucial development for the economy of the West. New machines cut the time required for harvesting grains roughly in half between 18, and half again by 1880. As a result most farmers who produced for the market faced continual labor shortages, especially in the harvest season but this would soon change. In the opening decades of the nineteenth century the amount of acreage a family could cultivate often depended on how many people they could get into the fields.
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