Steeles Tavern: Where the Reaper Was Born

The community you are passing through takes its name from a roadside tavern kept by a man named Steele. But the moment that made Steeles Tavern famous in American history came in July of eighteen thirty-one, when a twenty-two-year-old named Cyrus McCormick rolled a strange contraption into a field and let it run. The machine cut grain faster than a team of men swinging cradle scythes.

That demonstration, right here on the edge of the Shenandoah Valley, was one of the first public demonstrations of the mechanical reaper. McCormick patented the design three years later. Within a generation, the reaper had transformed the American grain belt and helped the North feed its armies during the Civil War.

The family farm where he grew up, Walnut Grove, stands nearby in Rockbridge County, now preserved as a National Historic Landmark.