[1] Originally from the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, he and many members of the McCormick family became prominent residents of Chicago.

His efforts built on more than two decades of work by his father Robert McCormick Jr., with the aid of Jo Anderson, an enslaved African-American man held by the family.

Building on his father's years of development, Cyrus took up the project aided by Jo Anderson, an enslaved African-American man held on the McCormick plantation.

Cyrus McCormick held one of his first demonstrations of mechanical reaping at the nearby village of Steeles Tavern, Virginia in 1831.

Using the endorsement of his father's first customer, Khane Hale, for a machine built by McPhetrich, Cyrus continually attempted to improve the design.

[6] As word spread about the reaper, McCormick noticed orders arriving from farther west, where farms tended to be larger and the land flatter.

In 1847, after their father's death, Cyrus and his brother Leander J. McCormick (1819–1900) moved to Chicago, where they established a factory to build their machines.

At the time, other cities in the midwestern United States, such as Cleveland, Ohio; St. Louis, Missouri; and Milwaukee, Wisconsin were more established.

Chicago had the best water transportation from the east over the Great Lakes for his raw materials, as well as railroad connections to the west where most of his customers would be.

A company advertisement was a take-off of the Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way mural by Emanuel Leutze; it added to the title: "with McCormick Reapers in the Van.

[citation needed] A lifelong Democrat, before the American Civil War, McCormick had published editorials in his newspapers, The Chicago Times and Herald, calling for reconciliation between the national sections.

Although his invention helped feed Union troops, McCormick believed the Confederacy would not be defeated and he and his wife traveled extensively in Europe during the war.

McCormick unsuccessfully ran for Congress as a Democrat for Illinois's 2nd congressional district with a peace-now platform in 1864, and was soundly defeated by Republican John Wentworth.

[citation needed] Beginning in 1872, McCormick served a four-year term on the Illinois Democratic Party's Central Committee.

McCormick also became the principal benefactor and a trustee of what had been the Theological Seminary of the Northwest, which moved to Chicago's Lincoln Park neighborhood in 1859, a year in which he endowed four professorships.

[17] McCormick and later his widow, Nettie Day McCormick, also donated significant sums to Tusculum College, a Presbyterian institution in Tennessee, as well as to establish churches and Sunday Schools in the South after the war, even though that region was slow to adopt his farm machinery and improved practices.

[citation needed] For the last 20 years of his life, McCormick was a benefactor and member of the board of trustees at Washington and Lee University in his native Virginia.

Numerous prizes and medals were awarded McCormick for his reaper, which reduced human labor on farms while increasing productivity.

Thus, it contributed to the industrialization of agriculture as well as migration of labor to cities in numerous wheat-growing countries (36 by McCormick's death).