When the United States was still a young country, its greatest wealth lay in millions of acres of rich, virgin soil. At first, it could be reached only by cutting down the forest that stretched from the Alleghenies to the Mississippi. But as the tide of expansion swept westward, settlers began cultivating the rolling prairie flatlands that were to become Iowa, Kansas, and Nebraska. In turn, this new territory was cropped and recropped for the grain on which the country’s life depended. As the Midwest grew up behind the frontier, mixed farming took over in areas where wheat had been grown. Corn was raised and fed to cattle and hogs, which were moved to centers like Cincinnati to be slaughtered and packed. Farming was becoming an industry, and gradually that industry would develop its own basic essentials: barbed wire for fencing; fertilizer to put life back into the depleted earth; the steel plow to turn the tough prairie sod; the reaper to do the labor of men in the harvest field.

The coming of the Civil War in 1861, with huge armies needing to be fed, brought an even greater stimulus to farming. Cities flowered along with the crops. Somehow food production kept pace with the burgeoning population; the number of Americans increased from 7 million in 1810 to almost 63 million when the frontier was officially declared closed in 1890. By developing its agriculture, the United States became a modern nation. Three men with unusual foresight and tenacity found the key to riches in organizing the growth and sale of vast quantities of grain, livestock, and tobacco. In short, they made fortunes from the farm.

Cyrus Hall McCormick was born in 1809. He was the eldest son of a successful farmer in Rockbridge County, in the rolling fertile country of western Virginia. There, men raised wheat, rye, oats, corn, and livestock on small plantations and farms. In a section remote from cities and markets, planters became used to doing things on their own - preaching a sermon, doctoring the sick, or solving a mechanical problem without an engineer’s help.

So it was natural for Cyrus’s father to tinker with machinery that might help to stretch his limited labor force, and the boy grew up feeling at home in the plantation blacksmith shop. He watched his father create an improved bellows, better machinery for his grist mill, and a device to speed up the process of making hemp fiber into rope. Gradually Cyrus, too, learned to experiment with equipment.

The times called for more and more inventive talent. Farmers were constantly being encouraged to improve the quality and quantity of their crops. Agricultural societies and newspapers were founded to spread information about new fertilizers and improved seeds. They also offered bounties for any novel gadgets that would speed the age-old tasks of planting a crop, protecting it while it ripened, and gathering it.

In this atmosphere, Cyrus turned his thoughts toward better ways of harvesting wheat. This vital crop was still gathered in the ancient fashion, by scything. A first line of men walked through the fields, cutting the stalks of grain with long scythes; and a second line followed them to bind the fallen wheat into sheaves. Six men could cut and bind two or three acres of wheat in a day. But the period when the grain was ready for cutting, yet not overripe, was barely a week or ten days. A machine that could do several men’s work would be a godsend to every farmer facing a desperate race with time, and various inventors in Europe and America began experimenting with a number of devices for wheat harvesting.

In the summer of 1831, Cyrus McCormick appeared in a neighbor’s field with a homemade machine that successfully combined several previously known principles. It was pulled by one or two horses from the side so that they would not trample the uncut grain. A main wheel was connected by gears and belts to a revolving reel with sticks set in it, rather like a windmill, and a saw-toothed knife that vibrated back and forth. The reel pressed the grain back against a set of iron fingers that separated the stalks. The knife cut them off, and they fell back on a platform from which they were raked to the ground.

McCormick spent a couple of years perfecting this early reaper, as he named the machine, before he patented it in 1834. It was a homely looking contraption, but with one man driving, one raking, and five following to bind the sheaves, it could cut as many as ten acres a day. It would take nearly three times the number of men to harvest the same ten acres with the scythe.

Cyrus McCormick saw that his reaper was the seed of a revolution in grain growing. He could have gained a considerable reputation and considerable wealth from selling others the rights to manufacture his invention, but he wanted to do it himself. In 1840, he delivered his first three machines - made in the plantation blacksmith shop - and already he envisioned an army of reapers spreading over the land.

His task was not simple. The Virginia Reaper, as it was now called, had to be sold to American farmers - traditionally wary of expensive and untried machinery. And McCormick had many competitors. The toughest was a one-eyed ex-whaler named Obed Hussey, who had patented his own reaper. In 1843, the two agreed to a competitive trial near Richmond. On the first day, McCormick’s machine cut seventeen acres, and Hussey’s only two. In a second round, the next week, McCormick’s cut only twelve, but the Hussey reaper broke down altogether. Though Hussey continued in business until 1860, he never produced more than 521 reapers a year, while McCormick had leaped ahead and was making thousands. Far more than a mechanically clever farmer, McCormick became a master manufacturer and an aggressive salesman.

In 1847, he made his biggest decision. He set up a reaper factory in the Midwest, in a small settlement of 17,000 people at the south end of Lake Michigan. He observed that the little town of Chicago was placed conveniently between the Mississippi River and the Great Lakes, and plans were afoot to use it as a starting point for railroads running westward. Farmers - and reapers - would follow those iron trails to virgin prairies, whose soil, fresh to the plow, could grow many more bushels of wheat per acre than the tired lands to the east. America’s “bread basket” of the future would be the northern half of the great tableland between the Mississippi and the Rockies. McCormick foresaw that rail connections would make Chicago the region’s capital city, an ideal place to build his machines and his fortune.

His guess was amazingly shrewd. By 1857, Chicago was shipping over 9 million bushels of wheat per year from its lake wharves, and its population was approaching 100,000. In the big brick McCormick works, close to the Chicago River, hundreds of men and steam-driven machines were making 4,000 reapers a year.

To sell them, McCormick built up a modern business team. First, he inundated farming counties with advertisements in newspapers and on posters. Then McCormick agents appeared on the scene with sample machines, often entering them against rival reapers in contests at county fairs. Bands tootled, hard cider flowed, and crowds followed the sweating teams, cheering for their favorites. McCormick’s machines won most of these contests hands down, and not only in America. In the London Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851 - a World’s Fair of its day - the Virginia Reaper won a grand prize. In France, in 1855, a reaper performed for an audience that included the son of Emperor Napoleon III and nine Arab sheiks and again won the prize. The impressed Emperor bought one. Some reapers even reached Russia.

Once a farmer in Illinois or Iowa had a hankering to buy, McCormick made it easy for him. He could pay one-quarter of the cost of a machine worth $100 to $130, and take care of the balance after the harvest was in. With each machine went a sheet of printed instructions and a kit of spare parts. As added protection, however, McCormick salesmen were trained in repairs, and traveling experts handled unusually complicated breakdowns. Advertising, the installment plan, and factory-trained repairmen were signs of a new age, and they brought impressive results.

Before the Civil War, many Southerners had expected England to recognize an independent South because the British needed raw cotton for their cloth factories. They did need that cotton, but needed even more the 200 million bushels of wheat imported from the North during the war years. So, ironically, King Cotton, made prosperous by Yankee Eli Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin, was toppled by King Wheat, brought to the throne by the reaper a Virginian had invented.

By 1860, the United States had over 100,000 reapers in use - 33,000 of them made by McCormick. That year, farmers raised close to 174 million bushels of wheat, mainly in Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin. As the increased needs of a wartime economy brought new tracts of land under cultivation, an army of 250,000 reapers and mowers turned out to harvest them. By the early 1870s, McCormick and his rivals were selling 125,000 machines each year.

McCormick grew old and wealthy. He lived comfortably in his elaborate New York and Chicago homes and was active in the Democratic Party and Presbyterian church affairs. He helped to found McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago. He still worked hard, much of the time battling other manufacturers who infringed his patents. When he died in 1884, it was estimated that more than half a million McCormick reapers were bringing home the harvest in countries all over the world.

McCormick had a Chicago neighbor who also brought together man’s inventiveness, his eternal need for food, and the generous American soil. He was Philip D. Armour, who was born on a farm in Stockbridge, New York in 1832, the year after McCormick first tried out his reaper.

Armour was an adventurous and imaginative youngster. When he was twenty, the great overland trek to the California gold fields was on. He joined a wagon train as a teamster and made the long march across plain and mountain. In the mining camps, he became a contractor, building the sluices - artificial ditches - that carried water from mountain streams to wash the gold-bearing ores out of the earth. After a few years, Armour was $6,000 richer than when he had arrived and ready for a triumphant return home to Stockbridge.

But he soon found life on the farm dull and went west again, this time to Milwaukee, where one of his brothers was a wholesale dealer in grain and provisions. By 1862, he was a partner (with John Plankinton) in a firm of his own. Part of its business was buying hogs from local farmers for delivery to slaughterers and packers. The demands of the hungry Union armies created a boom in pork and Armour prospered.

His biggest early success was in a transaction that may seem somewhat sharp, though, in fact, it was quite legal. Toward the end of 1864, when food prices were swollen and seemed likely to stay high as long as the war continued. Armour gambled on his own certainty that the South would shortly be defeated. He contracted to deliver pork in the spring of 1865 at the then-current price of $40 a barrel. He took orders for more meat than he had in his warehouses; he was taking a chance that by the time he had to fulfill his orders, the price would have plummeted. It did. Armour was able to buy pork at $18 per barrel and sell it for $40 - and net a profit of some $2 million. Disgruntled traders who had to honor their contracts, and buy Armour’s meat at twice the market price, had also to agree that here was a young businessman worth watching.

Up till the Civil War, the preparation of meat had been a local business. Cattle and hogs were driven in herds to butchers, but could not travel far without serious loss of weight. Once killed, by crude hand methods, their flesh could only be preserved by salting and smoking. Since, even in that form, it could not keep long, each slaughtering center could serve only a small territory.

Armour saw how the railroad network had grown by the war’s end. He knew that the great corn belts of Iowa and Nebraska and the prairie grasses of Kansas and Texas could support hundreds of thousands of hogs and steers. If they could be brought by train to central points like Chicago to be slaughtered in large numbers at high speed; and if the beef and pork could be preserved for rail shipment to the east, then meat packing could be a national industry. Mass production would bring lower prices and bigger markets; steers and porkers could build the foundations of fortune in the stockyards. Armour may only have realized all this as time went on, but his moves seem to show a gathering of forces to undertake meat preparation on a massive scale.

In 1875, he moved to Chicago where he was in competition with other aggressive and talented packers, men like Gustavus Swift and Nelson Morris. In fierce battles with each other, they broke through one technical barrier after another. Armour commanded his armies of buyers, workmen, and salesmen from a Chicago office in which he worked from 7 a.m. until late at night. Bald, with reddish side-whiskers, he was a familiar sight in the plant as he checked up on countless small details. He was quick to discharge a workman for a task poorly done. But on the other hand, a good job would be noticed and rewarded with the invitation, “Buy yourself a suit of clothes” - at the boss’s expense.

Armour and his rivals began by turning meat packing into an assembly-line operation. Hogs and steers were herded into narrow chutes which led to the slaughterhouses; there they were stunned by a hammer-blow on the head. Next, they were slung up by the hind legs to an overhead moving belt. Then they moved past long lines of men working at top speed, who cut their throats, removed their vital organs, peeled off hides and bristles, and sawed the carcasses into chops, steaks, and hams. This organized teamwork could process thousands of animals a day, the product of a hundred farms or an entire ranch. A steer, raised for two years in far-off Texas, driven hundreds of miles by cowboys to Abilene or Dodge City, then shipped further hundreds of miles by cattle car to the Union Stockyards, could be turned into prime beef, ready for the oven, in less than an hour.

Armour’s chemists worked out dozens of ways of using what had once been waste products to produce soap, glue, glycerin, and fertilizer. A popular saying had it that every part of the pig was used except the squeal.

Armour and his rival, Gustavus Swift, financed experiments with refrigerator cars. Early models were crude ice chests on wheels, but as time went on, better methods of insulation and of making artificial ice were introduced. Soon Chicago plants were shipping dressed beef and pork to markets thousands of miles away. Since the railroads were reluctant to invest in building such cars, the packers built their own. By 1890, Armour alone had 6,000 refrigerator cars in service. The nation’s slaughtering business settled in a few centers linked by rails to the livestock supply - chief among them were Kansas City, Cincinnati, and Chicago. Refrigerated ships gave American meat an international market too. By the early twentieth century, the poet Carl Sandburg could justifiably address Chicago as “Hog butcher for the world!”

By the end of his twenty-fifth year in Chicago, the New York farm boy had become a meat baron. His investment in banks provided him with money to buy gigantic herds of animals whenever opportunity beckoned. He was a heavy trader in feed grains. His refrigerator cars tied him to the country’s railroad empires. He was so successful that, in combination with his fellow packers, he could be arbitrary in controlling food prices. He could also deny opportunities in the meat business to thousands of smaller operators. The country was never quite sure how it felt about men like him. Sometimes they were praised as poor boys who had made good. At others, they were denounced as wicked monopolists.

No one can set an exact value on the part played by an individual in a great historical development such as the revolution in food-producing techniques. Armour’s fortune came partly because of things he had little to do with - the presence of abundant grazing land for vast herds and the invention of the locomotive to speed cattle and hogs from pasture to slaughterhouse to market. Yet Armour was visibly an organizer of the process that combined invention, natural resources, and capital in order to put food into millions of mouths. This ability won him admiration. He was also rewarded on a princely scale while others who worked desperately hard stayed poor. Such conditions naturally provoked jealousy and raised many questions about the fairness of the new economic order. Both the applause and the criticism were, like Armour and his fortune, characteristic of the new age.

One other fortune came out of American agriculture after the Civil War. It began in a ramshackle barn near Durham, North Carolina, in the lean years after Lee’s surrender. The barn belonged to a Confederate veteran named Washington Duke. He had come back from the wars with two blind mules and fifty cents in cash. But he had hope, energy, and three strong sons. Together, they grew a crop of the broad, yellow-leafed tobacco known in North Carolina as bright leaf. They hung it in the barn, cured it over smoky fires, then undertook the arm-wearying job of pulverizing the cured leaves by beating them with flails. They packed the tobacco in barrels, wrestled them into a wagon, and then traveled through the countryside making sales. They slept little and ate less. But they returned with a small profit.

The youngest of these brothers was James Buchanan Duke. When the war ended, young “Buck” was only nine years old. But he came to believe that tobacco could bring more than salvation for defeat: The manufacture and sale of its products on a big enough scale could make a man rich.

Business was always at the top of Buck’s mind. By the time he was a teenager, his father could afford to send him away to school. The boy chose a business academy in Poughkeepsie, New York. He loved the planning of purchases and sales “better than anything else,” he said. After school, he returned home to rejoin the family business and by 1880, though only twenty-four, he was its natural leader. And he was ambitious. A small regular income was available from the sale of Duke’s pipe and chewing mixtures, but Buck had his eye on bigger things. His goal was a national market for Duke products.

As was so often the case in this period, a machine gave the answer. A man named James Bonsack had invented a machine for rolling cigarettes. The little paper-covered smokes had been gaining on pipe, cigar, and plug in national popularity ever since the Civil War. They were quick to smoke, handy to carry, and neater than the “chaw” that a century ago polka-dotted streets and buildings with puddles of tobacco juice. However, cigarettes could only be rolled by experts, and those experts were not easy to entice to the communities around Durham where the tobacco grew.

But a Bonsack machine, Duke realized in 1881, could be made to roll 100,000 cigarettes a day, as against the handworker’s 2,500. Although its design needed improvement, the machine required no skill to operate, and Duke installed two of them. Over the next three years he worked on increasing output until, by 1884, the machines were turning out 200 cigarettes a minute. Just before production hit its peak, he slashed the price of a pack of cigarettes from ten to five cents. “Tobacco is the poor man’s luxury,” he said. Soaring sales proved him right, and in 1884, Buck set out to establish a factory in New York.

Duke’s passion for business helped him out. Since he felt no need for luxuries, he rented a $2-a-week room and ate at cheap restaurants on the Bowery. He gave his life to the study of other men’s smoking habits. It was said that he would pick up discarded cigarette packages on the streets, to see which brands were most in favor. These were the ones he had to beat. Though frugal in his personal habits, he spent lavish sums of money on advertising. Pictures of Duke-owned brands of cigarettes appeared on billboards, in magazines, and in theater programs. He had the notion of enticing customers by putting a color-illustrated card in each pack. At first, they carried portraits of famous statesmen; later, pictures of baseball players and stage celebrities catered to more popular tastes.

At the office, where Duke worked a fourteen-hour day, he regularly checked records of sales to every tobacconist on the company’s mailing list. If sales fell off, even slightly, salesmen in that district were hounded for an explanation. Clerks were taught that the smallest mistake could be noticed by the owner himself. They learned to hustle. Duke once noticed a group of girl clerks signing forms by hand. One was not keeping up with the others. Her name, it appeared, was Maggie McConiehie. “Too long,” said Duke. “Change your signature to A. B. Cox.” And A. B. Cox it was.

By 1890, all this efficiency was paying off. Duke was manufacturing and selling nearly a billion cigarettes a year under various brand names - half the country’s total output. But his dream was bigger still. The boy who had gone barefoot and hungry on a wartime Southern farm intended to control the manufacture and sale of every kind of tobacco in America. Using the profits he had made from cigarettes, he bought an interest in rival firms producing cigars, snuff, plug, and pipe tobacco. Then he prodded them into becoming members of a huge combine called a trust, where the direction of all the member firms lies in the hands of a small group of men. Duke called his trust the American Tobacco Company, and as its president, his power was almost unlimited.

American Tobacco became a colossus. It was able to offer bonuses and rebates, or kickbacks, to dealers who would give its wares extra advertising and display space - or who would boycott rival products altogether. One after another, remaining competitors were forced to sell to American Tobacco. Then Duke moved into other areas, buying factories that made boxes, tinfoil, flavoring, and also buying chains of retail tobacco stores. His aim was always to cut down the sums he had to pay others for furnishing him ingredients or selling his products.

American Tobacco moved on relentlessly. Duke’s agents began turning up at tobacco auctions in India, Cuba, Egypt, and Greece, to buy new varieties amid exotic surroundings. Agreements were made with British manufacturers to divide territories all over the world. One factory was even set up in China. Around the world, men were smoking American Tobacco cigarettes with many different brand names, and all these sales meant huge profits for Duke’s tobacco trust.

For the tobacco farmers of the South, Duke was both a boon and a handicap. The mass market for smoking meant increasing crops. Millions of pounds of tobacco were grown annually, and worn-out valleys in the Carolinas knew the sound of the hoe and wagon wheel once more. But the trust also kept down the prices it paid to the farmers. Naturally, they complained. So did the few manufacturers who had withstood the pressure to join American Tobacco. Objections also were raised by retail tobacconists who claimed that the trust’s policies left them little margin for profit, and by many other Americans who believed in free competition. Invoking the Sherman Antitrust Act, which had been passed in 1890, the Supreme Court in 1911 ordered American Tobacco reorganized into a number of independent companies.

James B. Duke kept his interest in most of them and his fortune was undiminished. Like most men raised to work hard, he could not relax. He took few vacations and spent little time at his residences in London and New York or on his beautiful farm in New Jersey. Work was his life. When he could no longer expand his empire in smoke, he invested in hydroelectric power developments in North Carolina and Canada. He also invested in people by his gifts. The most notable of them was an endowment of well over $40 million granted to Durham’s little Trinity College, which obligingly took the name of Duke University. Forty years after his death in 1925, more people probably associate the name of Duke with this center of higher learning than with tobacco products.

All three of these men who made farmland fortunes were in some ways alike. Originally farm boys, from close-knit families (each began his career in partnership with brothers), they were limited in general education and refinement. Each of them used new techniques of advertising and marketing to build his empire. All three found that their growing wealth pushed them into new lines of work, making them men of great power. This power came directly from the amazing fertility of the American earth. By harnessing the machines of the industrial revolution to create a further revolution in agriculture, these men opened new ways for other adventurers to grow rich from the soil.