America at the Fair Read online

  The Agricultural Building was designed by the New York architectural firm McKim, Mead & White. This card was issued by Montgomery Ward & Company of Chicago. Aaron Montgomery Ward was a traveling salesman who realized that his rural customers wanted the same fancy goods available to city folk. He first issued his mail-order catalog in 1872 and it soon grew to contain 10,000 items. Competition came in the 1890s from Sears, Roebuck and others.

  Agricultural Equipment

  The Fair chronicled the westward migration of America and the shift away from the family farm to the large mechanized corporation. Before mechanization, the farmer used a wooden plow to turn over the earth before scattering the seed by hand. In the fall, the farmer, with scythe or sickle in hand, could barely cut an acre of ripe grain, despite toiling from sunrise to sunset. The cut grain was taken to the threshing floor, where a team of horses, walking in a circle, crushed the stalks to separate the grains from the straw. The mixture was tossed into the air with pitching forks to blow off the chaff. The grain was then carried by wagon to the mill for grinding into flour. This method of farming had hardly changed since the Middle Ages (Hawke 1989).

  The farmers taking up large land-claims in the Midwest could hardly complete all their work using these old methods. It was machinery, horsepower, windmills, and fences that allowed a family, without slaves or indentured servants, to prepare the soil, plant the seed, and harvest the crop as well as tend to their animals and grow vegetables and fruit. The fertile lands of the Midwest yielded much more than a family needed for its own use. The surplus of the harvest was sold in the market towns, giving the farmer money for the next year’s seed and improvements. During the Civil War, the use of machinery allowed a farmer’s sons to join the Union Army, knowing that the farm work would still be done. America’s mechanized farms produced harvests more abundantly than anywhere else, and gave the nation a distinct advantage in the world markets. Farming, especially in the Midwest, expanded dramatically after the Civil War. In 1870 there were 2,660,000 American farms and 20 years later the figure had risen to 4,650,000. After 1890, these family farms were fast giving way to corporations owning 20,000 acres and more, employing hundreds of men and horses, and using many plows, harvesters, and other machines.

  Syracuse Chilled Plow was one of hundreds of American plow companies in business at the time of the Fair. It later became part of the John Deere corporation.

  The growth of agriculture in the Midwest and the South created vast opportunities for farm implement makers. The Farm Implement News Company of Chicago issued annual buyers guides listing American farm machinery companies. In 1893, there were over 400 American plow companies and as many again making harvester and threshing machines. Many of these companies displayed their equipment in the annex of the Agricultural Building. Windmills, pumps, rakes, cider presses, incubators, hoes, cattle-feeding machines, harrows, fertilizers, seeders, spreaders, cotton gins, corn huskers, centrifuges, broadcast sowers, and corn crushers were all on display alongside the harvesters and plows. At least one commentator found the farm machinery “as handsome as pianos” (Truman 1893). John Deere, Cyrus McCormick, and William Deering gave their names to enduring and famous brands. Geiser, Stoddard, Foos, and Porter were among the many lesser-known brands on display. Nearly all these machines were powered by wind, pulled by horses, or turned by hand. But change was evident with the Aultman & Taylor Machinery Company of Mansfield, Ohio, displaying its traction steam engines.

  John Deere’s father arrived in the New World around 1790 and settled in Rutland, Vermont, where he married a local girl. Their son was born in 1804. The boy had little formal education and was apprenticed to a blacksmith, repairing the coaches and carriages that passed through the town. Deere failed in several attempts to set himself up as a blacksmith in Vermont. He could not repay his debts, and was arrested and threatened with imprisonment. Not easily discouraged, at age 32 he left his family behind to seek his fortune in Illinois. Traveling for several weeks by coach, barge, and boat, he arrived at the village of Grand Detour on the Rock River where he set himself up as a blacksmith. Once established, he wrote to his family to join him there (Broehl 1984).

  John Deere mended shovels, repaired pitchforks, and sharpened the tines of hay forks. The earth on the prairies was rich and crops grew well. Still the local farmers, many of them fellow New Englanders who had carried their tools with them, complained that the wet prairie soil clung to their plows. After a short distance, they had to stop their horses to scrape off the rich earth clinging to the plow parts. Deere analyzed the problem and concluded that the soil was less likely to cling if the plowshares were made from smooth and highly polished metal. Using a broken saw blade he fashioned such a plowshare, to the delight of his neighbors. Very soon the demand for John Deere plows expanded. Deere ordered high quality steel from England and hired 10 men to fill the orders for his polished metal plows. He became known far and wide as the “Inventor of the Steel Plow.” John Deere’s advertisements stated that his plow “was made of wrought iron and the share of steel. The share is ground smooth, so that it scours perfectly bright in any soil, and will not choke in the foulest of ground” (1843 advertisement).

  When he learned that the railroad was not coming to Grand Detour, Deere left the town and moved to Moline, Illinois, on the Mississippi River. Here he established a plow factory, powered by a waterwheel. He imported machinery from the East and began to mass-produce his plows. In 1849 the Deere factory built 2,136 plows. Three years later he built over 4,000, and in 1856, production exceeded 15,000 plows a year, using the latest technology. At the time of the 1893 Fair, Deere & Company of Moline, Illinois, was selling 50,000 plows annually and was the nation’s leading plow company. After John Deere died in 1886 at age 82 his son Charles expanded the business by absorbing smaller competitors including the Syracuse Chilled Plow Company, which became John Deere-Syracuse.

  The John Deere company had a large exhibit in the Agricultural Building. There were sulky plows, shovel plows, breaking plows, walking plows, sitting plows, and gang plows. Among the other plow companies with displays at the Fair was Thomas Wiard of Batavia, New York, one of America’s first plow makers. Wiard built wooden plows before shifting to metal. Also at the Fair were the Bucher & Gibbs Plow Company of Canton, Ohio; the Oliver Chilled Plow Works; and the South Bend Chilled Plow Company of Indiana, which displayed a model plow made of gold.

  Adriance, Platt of Poughkeepsie, New York, was another company that was overwhelmed by the larger Midwest farm implement makers.

  Cyrus Hall McCormick is the best known of the men who revolutionized methods of harvesting. He was born in 1809 in Walnut Grove, Virginia, the oldest of eight children. His father Robert, a prosperous Southern farmer, left the hard work of the grain harvest to his African slaves, while he concentrated on the design for the mechanical harvester. He determined that a reaping machine should have the cutting shaft to one side to prevent the horse from trampling the grain. The moving knives needed to come together like a pair of scissors, followed by a device to straighten out the cut grain for easy bundling. After years of effort trying to perfect his reaping machine, in 1832 Robert McCormick passed this task to his oldest son. Cyrus worked long hours in the family blacksmith shop to resolve the difficulties before his machine was finally ready for sale. Cyrus was aware that farmers from the East were moving to the fertile lands of the Midwest. He left Virginia and in 1847 opened a harvester factory in Chicago and invited his brothers Leander and William to join him. It took time to persuade the farmers to change their habits and buy a mechanical harvester costing $120. McCormick advertised widely, offering extended credit at 6 percent interest to buy his reaper, with which a two-man and two-horse team could harvest more wheat than 10 men working with the scythe or sickle (Cronon 1991). The McCormick harvester won a prize at the 1851 Crystal Palace fair in London. Cyrus McCormick vigorously protected his harvester against competitors and frequently sued for patent infringement. In 1855 McCormick sued t
he John Manny Company of Rockford, Illinois. The case of McCormick vs. Manny, also known as “The Reaper Suit,” has achieved fame for the people involved. The Manny company hired a respected Philadelphia law firm, which sent Peter Watson as its representative. Watson in turn sought the counsel of a local lawyer and hired Abraham Lincoln of Springfield, Illinois, to assist in arguing the case for the defendant. When the trial was moved from Chicago to Cincinnati, Peter Watson and his firm no longer needed Lincoln’s services and chose Edwin McMasters Stanton in his place. Both Stanton and Watson were condescending and even rude toward Lincoln, whom they regarded as a bumbling and gawky small town lawyer. Years later Stanton changed his opinion and joined President Lincoln’s Civil War cabinet as secretary of war (Goodwin 2005).

  Cyrus McCormick did a brisk business until the Great Fire of 1871 destroyed his factory. McCormick hired experts from Colt Firearms in Connecticut and the Wilson Sewing Machine Company in Massachusetts to design a new state-of-the-art factory along the south branch of the Chicago River. In less than two years, the steam-powered, five-story factory tooled for mass production was ready. The shift from muscle power to machinery kept the price of the harvesters low and sales boomed. Before he died, McCormick had the satisfaction of knowing that 50,000 of his harvesters were sold each year (Evans 2004). His 25-year-old Princeton-educated son, Cyrus Jr., took over the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company, Chicago’s largest factory. Less subtle in management than his father, young Cyrus confronted demands for an eight-hour working day by cutting wages and installing more machinery to replace skilled workers. These decisions provoked bitter strikes, to which McCormick responded by hiring strikebreakers and seeking police protection. On May 3, 1886, the strikers clashed with the replacement workers, resulting in four deaths. The following day, a large protest meeting was held at Haymarket Square. Someone threw a bomb, killing and injuring many policemen and workers. Eight union leaders were arrested and found guilty of murder. In November 1887, four of the convicted men were hanged and one committed suicide in prison. The events at Haymarket Square are remembered to this day as one of the pivotal moments in the American labor movement (Green 2006). The McCormick Reaper Works survived the turmoil of 1886 and went on to greater production. At the Fair, the company staged a large exhibit of its harvesters, grain-binders, and grass-cutting machines.

  The McCormick company of Chicago was one of the largest harvester companies in the world. This card shows their new plant, built after the 1872 fire. At its peak, the factory built 50,000 harvesters a year.

  McCormick was the largest of many companies making harvesters. One of his leading competitors was Walter Abbot Wood, born in 1815 in Mason, New Hampshire. Walter trained as a blacksmith before he settled in Hoosick Falls, New York, where he built the Walter A. Wood Mowing & Reaping Company. In the early 1890s, Walter Wood built an immense plant in St. Paul to meet the needs of the Western farmer. The St. Paul plant was powered by machinery made by the Dodge Manufacturing Company of Mishawaka, Indiana, established in 1880 by Wallace H. Dodge, an innovator in power transmission.8

  During its time the Wood company sold over half a million mowers and harvesters in the United States and in markets abroad. Another New York–based harvester manufacturer was Adriance, Platt & Co. of Poughkeepsie. Hoosick Falls and Poughkeepsie boomed with their harvester companies, but declined early in the 20th century when their leading manufacturers failed.

  William Deering (1826–1913) was another New Englander who found success in the Midwest. He hailed from South Paris, Maine, but moved to Plano, Illinois, where he built his harvester with an attached binder. Deering believed that industry—and especially agriculture—made America great. In 1880 he moved his plant to Fullerton Avenue, Chicago, where he built an enormous brick factory covering 51 acres and employing 4,000 workers. The factory produced one completed machine every minute of every working day, year-round. Deering built horse-drawn mowers, binders, and reapers. Twenty steam-powered hammers repeatedly rained down blows that sounded like cannon shots. Hundreds of blacksmiths hammered on their anvils, adding to the deafening noise. Large machines cut steel, while in other sections of the factory, rows of men ground sheers to a razor’s edge. The factory’s lumber yard held 15 million feet of hardwoods. In the month of November 1892 alone, the Deering works processed six million feet of lumber, enough to fill 13 large lumber vessels or 155 railroad cars. William Deering & Company maintained branch offices in 36 cities from New York to Texas.

  The Warder, Bushnell & Glessner Company of Springfield, Ohio, also competed with McCormick’s exhibit at the Fair. Asa Smith Bushnell (born 1834 in Rome, New York) succeeded William McKinley and served two terms as governor of Ohio (1896–1900). Both he and his partner John J. Glessner commissioned the Boston-based architect Henry Hobson Richardson to design their grand homes. The John J. Glessner House—now a National Historic Landmark—is situated at 1800 South Prairie Avenue in Chicago. Built in 1887 for John Glessner, his wife, and their two children, the granite mansion built in the English Arts & Crafts style had 35 rooms, with a vast library and music room. The Glessners were early supporters of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Known as “Millionaires Row,” South Prairie Avenue was also home to George Pullman, Marshall Field, and other 19th-century Chicago luminaries. The Glessner House is one of the few surviving examples of Chicago’s opulent age. Filled with 6,000 artifacts, the house has been maintained as a museum.

  In the 20th century the number of American plow makers declined from 400 to only a few large corporations. Consolidation also greatly reduced the number of harvester companies. In 1902 the six largest Midwestern harvester companies—McCormick, Deering, Plano, Case, Milwaukee Harvester, and Warder, Bushnell & Glessner—merged to form the International Harvester Company. This Chicago-based company was one of the leading corporations in the United States and, by 1910, employed over 17,000 workers. Cumbersome steam and gasoline-powered farm machinery began appearing early in the 1890s, but it took another decade before horsepower was seriously threatened. As late as 1910 there were still 24 million horses and mules doing the heavy work on American farms. International Harvester introduced its gasoline-powered tractor and precipitated a Tractor War that involved the John Deere Company and Henry Ford’s automobile company. The small and efficient tractors produced by these companies pulled plows and reapers and became the workhorses of American agriculture.

  The Meat Packers

  Until the early 1800s, the American bison roamed freely over much of North America from Canada in the north and deep into Texas in the south and from the Rocky Mountains in the west to the Missouri River in the east. With a hump like a camel and hair like a lion, these great animals stood over six feet tall at the shoulder and weighed up to 2,000 pounds. The calves, born between April and June, stayed close to their mothers until the next birthing season. The bison fed off the tall grasses of the prairies and drank from streams and rivers. During the spring and summer the animals congregated in small herds, which joined together in the fall into great migrations moving south for warmth and fresh grasslands. These gatherings, called “the running season” were watched with awe by the settlers moving to the center of the country (Sandoz 1954).

  Native Americans hunted the bison on foot or on horseback, using arrows and knives. The Cheyenne and other Plains Indians depended on the bison for food, clothing, and tools, and took only what was needed. Before the coming of the European settlers, the prairies supported between 30 and 50 million bison. The settlers, armed with their guns and greed, slaughtered the bison in great numbers. Passengers in the safety and comfort of railroad carriages shot the animals for the sheer sport of it. Bison meat fed the railroad construction crews, the skins were dried and stretched into leather, and the bones crushed and sold for fertilizer. The notorious Buffalo Bill boasted that he had killed 4,200 bison in a 17-month period to feed the railroad laborers. By the close of the 19th century, the American bison that once roamed the plains in awesome numbers was almost extin
ct, with less than 1,000 remaining. The destruction of the bison had a severe effect on the lives of the Great Plain Indians, who had long coexisted with the herds (Cronon 1991).

  In the place of the buffalo and the Plains Indians came thousands of settlers with their herds of cattle, sheep, and pigs, making it necessary to demarcate the land to establish ownership rights and keep the animals on the owner’s land. In 1873, Joseph Farwell Glidden of DeKalb, Illinois, invented a machine to make barbed wire. Glidden sold his invention to the Worcester, Massachusetts, wire company Washburn & Moen, founded by Ichabod Washburn and his son-in-law Philip Moen in 1819. The company, with 3,000 workers, became the major producer of barbed wire for the hundreds of thousands of farms being established in the plains states. At the close of the 19th century Washburn & Moen merged into American Steel & Wire Company.

  Cincinnati was the early livestock center of the Midwest, but by 1860, railroads from Iowa, Wisconsin, Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky, Ohio, and Indiana carried the cattle, sheep, and hogs to the stockyards of Chicago. From Chicago, live animals were packed into freight trains and sent to the great population centers along the industrialized eastern seaboard. Transporting the whole animal to the slaughterhouses of Boston, New York, and Philadelphia was wasteful and expensive since only 45 percent of the total animal, the meat, was used. Also, some animals were injured or became diseased en route, leading to more waste. The innovative Chicago livestock brokers hit upon the idea of butchering the animals locally during the winter months and shipping hung carcasses in open freight trains to the Eastern markets. Sealed freight cars packed with ice, and later electrical refrigeration, made it possible to ship dressed meat year-round.