Cyrus McCormick Farm

In the summer of eighteen thirty-one, on a Rockbridge County farm called Walnut Grove, twenty-two-year-old Cyrus Hall McCormick demonstrated a horse-drawn mechanical reaper that could harvest grain faster than any crew of men with scythes. He had built it in the blacksmith shop on the family property, working off his father's earlier experiments. The first public demonstration took place just down the road at Steeles Tavern.

McCormick patented the machine in eighteen thirty-four and eventually moved manufacturing to Chicago, where demand from the vast Midwest prairies made him wealthy. That small Shenandoah Valley blacksmith shop grew into the International Harvester Company, one of the largest agricultural equipment manufacturers in the world. McCormick's descendants donated the farm to Virginia Tech in nineteen fifty-four; the original shop, gristmill, and eighteen twenty-two manor house are preserved as a historic site.