Mechanical reaper11/13/2023 ![]() Joe was a slave of the McCormick family from infancy, about Cyrus’s age and apparently intended as a companion for Cyrus. Hutchinson’s book says that Jo (or “Old Joe”) Anderson was the son of a slave named “Old Charlie,” whom one Adam McChesney told WJ Hanna he’d bought from Robert McCormick, Cyrus’s father, for $700. I’ve been unable to track a copy down (it may never have been published) every single quote from it in circulation comes from excerpts that appeared in William Hutchinson’s sprawling two volume biography of Cyrus McCormick that came out in the 1930s. Most of the information we have about Joe Anderson comes from statements Anderson himself gave to WJ Hanna, a company board member who in 1885 wrote a pamphlet called “Notes On a Virginia Trip,” which seems to have been a collection of interviews with people who remembered the early days of the mechanical reaper. Even now, the Wisconsin Historical Society maintains a McCormick archive that comprises thousands of boxes, including everything from letters, diaries, and medical records of family members to Cyrus’s wife’s death mask. They kept and preserved records carefully. If these stories were true, Anderson might not have been the inventor, per se, but could have been about as responsible for the final product as Cyrus was himself.įamily squabbles as to whether Cyrus should really get the credit, and constant lawsuits from other people who claimed to have invented similar devices, led the McCormick company to employ a LOT of historians, librarians, and researchers to document the history of the company and establish Cyrus as the real inventor. But there was also a faction of the family (including Cyrus’s brothers) who always insisted Cyrus’s father, Robert McCormick, was the real inventor, and Cyrus just made some minor improvements or a better prototype. A widely-printed 1970 newspaper article identified this photo as Joe it’s really his grandson, Harry Wilson.įrom available evidence, I’d say that’s probably a stretch Anderson probably just did the blacksmith work on the prototypes. ![]() Additionally, the the McCormick (later International Harvester) company has long acknowledged that Cyrus was helped in his work by a slave named Jo Anderson, and some have even suggested that Anderson was the real inventor. Plenty of other people were building similar devices with varying degrees of success, and whether Cyrus really invented his reaper or used his father’s designs has been the subject of inter-family squabbling for over a century. There’s also some dispute as to just how much credit Cyrus should really get. His brother William quit going to church because of all the abolitionist sermons. Of course, there’s strong evidence that Stanton’s quote was pure fiction, and these praises ignore the fact that Cyrus was an unrepentant slave owner who left the country during the Civil War because he feared an “abolitionist nightmare,” and corresponded with Robert E. An early bio said that McCormick’s invention had done as much to liberate people as Abraham Lincoln did. In the 1930s, the company began heavily promoting an Edwin Stanton quote stating that the reaper the country to feed Civil War troops and free up laborers to fight, eventually winning the war for the Union. There’s Katherine Dexter McCormick, a social activist.īut there’s no doubt that the family fortune was founded by Cyrus McCormick, whose mechanical reapers revolutionized farming, making it possible for small farmers to harvest far more land than they could by hand. There’s Col Robert McCormick of the Tribune. There’s philanthropist Harold Fowler McCormick, his first wife Edith Rockefeller McCormick. ![]() When I see a street, building, or complex with the name “McCormick” on it, I’m never sure WHICH McCormick it was named after quite a few members of the McCormick family became prominent in Chicago over the last 150 years. ![]()
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