CYRUS HALL McCORMI-CK 



wrote sentiment and humor; Gladstone, who 

 ennobled the politics of the British empire; and 

 McCormick, who gave the world cheap bread, 

 and whose life-story is now set before us in the 

 following pages. 



None of these eminent men, except Lincoln, 

 began life in as remote and secluded a corner of 

 the world as McCormick. His father's farm 

 was at the northern edge of Rockbridge County, 

 Virginia, in a long, thin strip of fairly fertile land 

 that lay crumpled between the Blue Ridge on 

 the east and the Alleghanies on the west. It 

 was eighteen miles south of the nearest town of 

 Staunton, and a hundred miles from the Atlantic 

 coast. The whole region was a quiet, industrious 

 valley, whose only local tragedy had been an 

 Indian massacre in 1764, in which eighty white 

 settlers had been put to death by a horde of 

 savages. 



The older men and women of 1809 could 

 remember when wolf-heads were used as cur- 

 rency; and when the stocks and the ducking- 

 stool stood in the main street of Staunton. Also, 

 they were fond of telling how the farmers of the 



