[4][5] For several years he was engineer and mechanic for the Holyoke Machine Company before resigning, and switching over to work for machinist firm, J. W.

[6] Prior to his work on waterwheels, McCormick was a music teacher, teaching classes for numerous schools in Indiana County.

While two of his brothers had served in the Union Army, one dying on the battlefield, McCormick considered himself a copperhead, and regarded the abolitionist industrialists of the North as opportunists.

In 1868, he would debut at the Bush Hotel in Bellefonte a satirical ballad called "The Ku-Klux-Klan", lampooning what he perceived to be a bogeyman of the Lincoln Republicans which he believed to be no more an enduring threat than the former Know-Nothing Party.

[1] After his engineering career in Holyoke, he purchased a large farmhouse in Pennsylvania in 1902 to live with his wife, 40 years his junior, and raise his 2 children.