The McCormick Reaper when it was first patented on June 21, 1834, the product was not useable. The Reaver and Mower have done for the harvest and hay field what steam has done for traveling, and the power loom with the hand loom, interposed wooden and iron muscles and iron sinews for slower hand labor. There are also souvenirs of the great World Exhibition, at London, when the McCormick’s Reaper, and the Collins Line of steamers and the yacht America bore away envied palms. Maps representing the chief grain and hemp growing regions of this country are made to know new subdivisions as the field of the Agents of McCormick’s Reaper and Mower, and by each name is a little column of figures giving the sales of successive years. Here in this Reaper office are exhibited not only the mathematical but the geographical accessories and aids to successful business. We do not propose to tarry long in the office among the busy clerks and bookkeepers, but that little will supply us with a hint as to how much sytem can and does accomplish. McCormick, Esq., brother of the proprietor, and for ten years manager of the Finance and General Control of the establishment. The reader accepted let us believe, our invitation for a stroll through the Works with W. The shipping and receiving facilities thus enjoyed are of immense value in an establishment of this class. The yard has a river dock of about three hundred feet, with a street front on North Water street. Other structures have risen beside it, until with the fine five-story Milwaukee brick stores and warehouses erected the last season, the Reaper Works comprise five buildings of from two to five stories each, all furnishing an aggregate of one hundred and ten thousand superficial feet of floor area. McCormick, on the north side of the river, below Rush street bridge, was built in 1846. The first erected of the present structures now standing on the extensive yards of Mr. McCormick, Esq., has been a fixed fact here, and not only as compared with all classes of our manufacture but more appropriately with its special class and department in the country at large, it has presented a history uniformly prosperous, and ever marked with the abundant proofs of energy, enterprise and skill in its management, and that with scarcely a parallel. While this is the case, and we are yet to occupy the firld now scarcely opened, the manufacturing era, we have within a few days past visited an establishment which, got a dozen years past, has occupied a prominent, and long a pioneer place in our manufactures.įor more than the period named, or since 1846, the Reaper and Mower Manufactory of C. High rents have built us a city with a celerity that almost realizes Aladdin, but hitherto they have driven away the masnufacturerm and the mechanic here seeking a home. We are setting in that direction already. The time will come when the vast system of railroads, here centering, and the far-reaching advantages of Lake and Canal navigation shall give life and activity to hundreds of large establishments yet to be erected representing the various fields of manufacture. We hail each accession to the number of individual or corporate enterprises looking in this direction. We not unfrequently, and always with gratification, are called upon, in the course of our rambles about the city, to refer to the manufacturing interests of Chicago, and invariably as with reason, do we urge the importance of our position as a manufacturing point. Location: North bank of the Chicago River, east of Rush Street Bridge
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