McCormick-International Harvester Company Branch House

About this property

The McCormick–International Harvester Company Branch House was built in 1898 in Madison, Wisconsin as a distribution center for farm implements of the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company. After McCormick merged into the International Harvester Company in 1902, the building was expanded and served the same function for the new company. In 2010 it was added to the National Register of Historic Places. Prior to industrialization, people harvested small grains like wheat by swinging a scythe and then manually tying the cut stems into bundles to dry. This was slow heavy work, with six people able to harvest about two acres of wheat in a day. With the Industrial Revolution, various people began trying to build machines to speed up the process. One of those tinkerers was Robert McCormick, a prosperous Virginia farmer. In the early 1800s he constructed a horse-drawn machine for cutting (reaping) grain. Robert was an inventor, but not a businessman. Though he patented some ideas, they never got far from his farm. His son Cyrus, however, was a promoter and businessman. In 1831 and 1832 Cyrus staged demonstrations of what the family reaper could do near his home. It impressed people on flat land, but did less well on hills. Obed Hussey of Ohio patented a reaper in 1833, which may have pushed Cyrus to patent his in 1834, but instead of rushing to sell, the McCormicks improved their design through the 1830s. Cyrus resumed public demonstrations in 1839 and sold two homemade reapers in 1840 for $110 each. They sold seven more in 1841. In 1843 a competition was held in which Hussey's reaper cut two acres and McCormick's larger reaper cut seven. Until 1843 the reapers were produced in the shop on the McCormick farm. In 1844 Cyrus began licensing the McCormick design to others to produce, including a company in upstate New York, but quality problems emerged at these other shops. In 1847 Cyrus consolidated production at one factory in Chicago, which was then a frontier town, but closer to the grain-growing prairies and water transportation. In 1849, the factory in Chicago made 1,500 reapers. The factory was destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, but McCormick rebuilt and branched out into new products, mostly by buying patents from other inventors. For example, they bought the rights to a "harvester" attachment for bundling the grain from a reaper from the Marsh Brothers. In 1884 McCormick's one factory in Chicago built 55,000 machines. In 1902 it built 35% of the US's farm machinery. In the 1880s McCormick shifted from a jobber system of distributing their equipment to a branch house system, in which McCormick itself established regional outlets which acted as agents for the manufacturer, selling a full line of products to independent retailers, who sold direct to farmers. Each branch house employed "blockmen" salesmen who each covered a chunk of territory; canvassers who tried to interest farmers in the product, helping both the blockmen and the dealers; and machinery experts who helped install, adjust and repair machines. The branch houses also provided credit to finance dealers' inventories, along with collection services. The regional branch houses were a step closer to the customer than McCormick's headquarters in Chicago.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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