McCormick, Cyrus, Farm and Workshop

Walnut Grove, near Steeles Tavern in Rockbridge County, Virginia, is the farm where Cyrus McCormick was born in 1809 and where he developed his reaper. Five buildings from the McCormick period survive: a brick main house built around 1822, a two-story log blacksmith shop on a stone foundation, a grist mill with working wooden parts, a small office and a slave cabin. The cabin has been moved and converted to a rest room, losing its second story and chimney. Today the farm operates as an experimental farm, and a three-acre memorial with models of early reapers is open to the public. The site matters because McCormick built the first working reaper here, and manufacture began here before moving to other states and then Chicago in 1847. The reaper let crops be cut faster with less labor, aided settlement of western lands and helped feed the North during the Civil War.