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Leander McCormick Biography

Leander McCormick Image

McCORMICK, Leander J., manufacturer, was born Feb. 8, 1819, at Walnut Grove, Va. He was one of the founders of The McCormick Harvesting Machine company. He took entire charge of the manufacturing department, and was able to make numerous valuable improvements upon the  original patterns. Having amassed a sufficient fortune, Mr. McCormick retired from the concern in 1889, and invested his means largely in stately business edifices in Chicago and has had the satisfaction of witnessing a great growth in value of his property. One of his public gifts was a twenty-six-inch refracting telescope, the largest in the world at the time, to the university of Virginia in Charlottesville, Va.

Thomas William Herringshaw, Herringshaw's Encyclopedia of American Biography of the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: American Publishers' Association, 1901) 633.