The same sturdy pioneer stock that gave America Daniel Boone and Lincoln, Robert Fulton and Andrew Jackson, produced the inventor of the reaper. He came of a line of resourceful, fearless Scotch-Irish settlers, bone of the bone and sinew of the sinew of those generations that laid the broad foundations of the United States. His great-grandfather had been an Indian fighter in the colony of Pennsylvania, his grandfather had moved to Virginia and fought in the Revolution, and his father had built a log-house and tilled a farm in that strip of arable Virginia land that lay between the Blue Ridge and the Alleghany Mountains. He prospered, and added neighboring farms to his original holding; he had two grist-mills, two sawmills, a blacksmith shop, a smelting-furnace, and a distillery; he invented new makes of farm machinery, and in addition was a man of considerable reading, able to hold his own in discussion with the lawyers and the clergymen of the countryside.
