Cyrus McCormick II Papers, 1888-1898
Cyrus McCormick II (1859-1936) became a trustee of Lake Forest University follwing the death of his father Cyrus in 1884, that gentleman having been a trustee since 1869, the year Ferry hall, the female seminary or girls' preparatory program of the University, opened. Cyrus II remained a trustee until 1914, and served as vice-president of the board of Trustees of the University from 1897 to 1901, exactly the same period that the Rev. Dr. James G.K. McClure served as president of the University, while also continueing to serve as pastor of the first Presbyterian Church of Lake Forest (1881-1905). In the period covered by these papers, 1888-1898, Lake Forest changed from a German-model university model, with professional programs in Chicago, to embracing officially a four-year liberal arts college model in a more English mode.
In 1886 the Haymarket Affair, a labor-police confrontation that ended with the throwing of the first bomb on the North American continent, had grown out of an earlier confrontation at Mccormick's Chicago plant where Pinkerton agents fired on striking employees and killed three. By the mid 1890s Cyrus McCormick was creating a large summer estate in southeast Lake Forest, an initiative which was foallowed by several McCormick family members and relations (Days, Blairs, etc.). Mrs. Cyrus McCormick (Harriet Hammond McCormick, also took summer classes in 1895 at the University on botany, at the outset of her development of the landscape at Walden, their on-hundred-acre estate with its famous ravine arboretum under the supervision of pioneer landscape architect Warren manning. MCormick also arranged for Manning to undertake a plan of the campus in 1897, which contributed to a 1906 plan by Benjamin Wistar Morris and which guided msot 20th C. development of Middle Campus.
By 1902 McCormick was leading, for his friend and relation John D. Rockefeller, the new International Harvester Trust, a pool of seven companies. One of these other firms was that of the Deering family, with Charles and James Deering representing in the new trust Rockefeller's rival, J.P. Morgan.
All of this is context for understanding this small group of McCormick's papers which were not included in the main body of the family's archives transfered to the Wisconsin State Historical Society library in the late 1940s. These turned up at a house sale in the early 1980s, were found by Carmen Adducci of Chicago, and she was advised by Hamill & Barker, booksellers, to donate them to Lake Forest College, for which we are very grateful. They contributed essential material on the period for the writing of Lake Forest College's first separately published history in 2000, 30 Miles North....
The papers appear to be McCormick's "C" and "D" non-Reaper Company files, with material on Lake Forest College, "College, "constituting much of the "C" material. Among other things they demonstrate McCormick's considerable involvement and leadership in this institution during this period.
A very brief or summary, folder-level finding aid to this two-box collection is available.
Elsewhere in Special Collections there are other materials relating to the Cyrus McCormicks, their local estate (Walden), music composed by Mr. McCormick in the 1930s (see the online catalog). See also the Walden and McCormick family files in the Special Collections reference files. See as well Landscape Art: Past and Present by Harriet Hammond McCormick (Scribner's, 1923), Classic Country Estates of Lake Forest, Architecture and Landscape Design, 1856-1940 by Kim Coventry, Daniel Meyer, and Arthur H. Miller (W.W. Norton, 2003) and Lake Forest: Estates, People and Culture by Arthur H. Miller and Shirley M. Paddock (Arcadia, 2000).