CYRUS HALL McCORMICK 



across the Mississippi and making the only 

 large water-fall in all that region. So he threw 

 aside his legal education and became the organi- 

 zer of a water-power company and the owner of 

 a little flour-mill. Soon the long line of Reapers 

 reached Minneapolis and swept on westwards 

 into the richest wheat lands that had ever been 

 known. The wheat overwhelmed the slow old- 

 fashioned mills, so the ex-lawyer in 1878 adopted 

 the Budapest system and built a roller-mill that 

 was the quickest and most automatic of its 

 kind. Other millers had by this time come to 

 Minneapolis Pillsbury, Crosby, Christian, 

 and Dunwoody; and all together they pushed 

 the flour business until in twelve years they had 

 become the main millers of the world. 



To-day the river of wheat is deepest at Minne- 

 apolis. Its twenty-two great mills roll 120,- 

 000,000 bushels into flour as an ordinary year's 

 work. While the swiftest mill in Athens, in 

 the age of Pericles, produced no more than two 

 barrels a day, there is one mill of incredible size 

 in Minneapolis that fills seventeen thousand 

 barrels in a twenty -four hours' run enough 



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