One of the greatest gifts by McCormick was endowing four chairs in the Presbyterian Theological Seminary of the Northwest in Chicago. The seminary had struggled to exist for several years in different locations but finally found a permanent site in Chicago in 1859 thanks to a gift of land from some city philanthropists and a $100,000.00 gift from McCormick to endow four faculty chairs.

This biography is not about a minister but instead briefly tells the life of a Presbyterian layman who was an inventor and industrialist. His life began on the farm as did many of the lives of antebellum entrepreneurs. Cyrus’s father Robert was born at Walnut Grove, Rockbridge County, Virginia, June 4, 1780, into the household of a successful and prosperous farmer. Robert was deeply interested in the mechanical aspects of agriculture and was a skilled worker of wood and iron enabling him to improve existing tools and develop new ones. When Cyrus Hall was born to Robert and Mary Ann (Hall) McCormick, February 15, 1809, it was into a home where his future would be directed vocationally towards the machinery of agriculture. But it was also certain his spiritual guidance would be defined by the Westminster Standards held to by his parents as Old School Presbyterians. One biographer of McCormick, Herbert N. Casson, has described the spiritual influences on Cyrus as having been “nourished on” Calvinism from the time when he “first learned to read out of the Shorter Catechism and the Bible” (158). Casson also notes,

From his father he had training as an inventor; from his mother he had executive ability and ambition; from his Scots Irish ancestry he had the dogged tenacity that defied defeat; and from the wheat-fields that environed his home came the call for the reaper, to lighten the heavy drudgery of the harvest. (25)

Cyrus invented his first successful machine for reaping grain when he was only twenty-two years old. It was not perfect, but it was the first step towards reducing the great number of people and hours of labor required for harvesting the fields full of amber waves of grain. He demonstrated his new machine to his father by harvesting rye on the family farm. Cyrus did not seek a patent until 1834 after three years of refining its design to improve the machine’s durability and efficiency. He continued to modify the reaper for another five years while living at Walnut Grove and using his father’s blacksmith shop. The first two machines he sold were purchased locally in 1840 but by 1843 he had sold forty reapers in Virginia. His market expanded until by 1845 he was selling reapers in Michigan, New York, Tennessee, Ohio, Illinois, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Missouri. The market had grown greatly in what is currently called the Midwest, so Cyrus moved his business to Chicago and expanded production with a new factory.

His reaper was described as having provided hunger-insurance for the United States and the greater part of the civilized world, with more than a half million manufactured since the first one was sold in Virginia. (Casson, 188)

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