Mary Virginia McCormick

Born in Chicago, Illinois[5] on May 5, 1861,[5][6] Mary Virginia McCormick was the eldest daughter[7] of Nancy Maria "Nettie" Fowler McCormick and Cyrus Hall McCormick,[8] the American inventor of the mechanical reaper[9][10] and industrialist[11][12] who founded the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company in 1847.[13][14] She was the couple's second child,[6][8][15] born two years after her brother, Cyrus McCormick Jr.[6][16] 

Mary Virginia McCormick circa 1872

In July 1862, she sailed with her family across the Atlantic aboard the SS Scotia to Liverpool, England,[17][18] and lived with her mother in London[19][20] while her father toured the United Kingdom, France and Germany to exhibit his farming invention.[20] When the McCormicks returned to the United States in 1864,[21][22] by mid-November[23][24] they occupied a second-floor suite at the Fifth Avenue Hotel[25] in New York City.[5][26]

While staying at the hotel, Mary McCormick and her older brother were infected with scarlet fever that winter,[5][25] an illness that took the life of her younger brother, Robert Fowler McCormick,[5][25] on January 6, 1865.[5][6] At the age of five, she lived at 40 Fifth Avenue[27] in Lower Manhattan after her father purchased the residential property for the family[5][28] in November 1866.[5]

The McCormicks settled in Chicago after the Great Chicago Fire in October 1871,[29][30][31] residing at 62 North Sheldon Street until the spring of 1875[32][33] and then moving to a house on 363 Superior Street.[32][33] Although Mary McCormick was educated by private tutors[34][35] and stayed at private boarding schools away from home,[36] she attended Central High School, a Chicago public school on Monroe Street.[7] In her early teenage years, she displayed musical talent and became a skilled pianist.[15][37]

When the McCormicks visited Europe in the summer of 1878,[38][39] the family addressed her thereafter by her middle name, Virginia.[40] In August,[41] she vacationed with her mother at St. Moritz,[40] a Swiss town near the Albula Alps, while her father featured the reaper at the World's Fair in Paris.[39][42] The pair then rejoined the family at the French capital in October[43][44] and stayed at the Hôtel du Jardin,[44][45] across from the Tuileries Garden.[44] Mary McCormick remained with her parents and younger siblings in Paris until mid-April 1879[46][47] to care for her father[48] as he recovered from a malignant carbuncle on the back of his neck.[49][50] During her stay, she visited museums, historic places, the French opera, performances by stage actress Sarah Bernhardt and a mass at Notre-Dame Cathedral with church music led by composer Charles Gounod.[47]

The family returned to the United States in the summer of 1879.[51] When the McCormicks moved into their new Chicago mansion on Rush Street in late November, she was at a boarding school in New York.[52]

Mary Virginia McCormick circa 1890

Mary McCormick exhibited signs of anxiety that worsened throughout her teenage years.[15][37] By the age of 18, she expressed delusional ideas and hallucinated.[15] She had frequent bouts of weeping and frantic praying.[15][37] Episodes of insomnia[37] were marked with incidents of her climbing out of windows[15] and wandering around at night.[15]  

At the age of 19,[2][53][54] she was diagnosed by doctors with dementia praecox.[37][55] Due to her medical diagnosis, doctors declared her as insane[54][56] and mentally incompetent[57][58] in 1880.[58] Her condition became worse after the death of her father[59] on May 13, 1884.[60][61][62] The following August,[63] she stayed at Clayton Lodge, the McCormick family estate in Richfield Springs, New York,[64] and after Christmas,[65] her mother brought her to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to seek treatment under the care of Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell, a neurologist.[66]

By 1889,[67] she occupied a camp in the Adirondack Mountains[67][68] of upstate New York and a house in the Upper West Side of Manhattan near the Hudson River,[67][68] two dwellings that were provided by her mother[67][68] who had employed a resident physician[67][68] and household attendants to care for her.[68] Grace Thorne Walker, a Canadian-born[69][70] business secretary for the McCormick family,[69] was the head of Mary McCormick's household[71] and served as her nursing companion.[72][73] Cyrus McCormick Jr. negotiated a three-year contract to recruit Dr. Alice Bennett,[71][74] a superintendent at the Norristown State Hospital for the Insane,[71] as Mary McCormick's attending physician in 1896[71][74] but Bennett resigned two years later[71][74] after resident nurses had accused the doctor of morphine addiction.[74]

Kildare manor in Huntsville, Alabama

In 1897,[2][15][75] Mary McCormick moved to the family estate at Riven Rock in Montecito, California[76][77] and lived there until 1904.[78] She stayed in Asheville, North Carolina[79] in the summer of 1898,[80] which became her winter residence.[81]

The Kildare manor near Oakwood Avenue in Huntsville, Alabama, then became her winter home[73][81][82] after her mother purchased the property from industrialist Michael Joseph O'Shaughnessy in 1900.[1][72] She kept a small herd of deer on the estate[83] and maintained a dairy that provided free milk to underprivileged children in Huntsville.[82] On May 5 of each year, an outdoor festival was held on the grounds of her manor for hundreds of invited schoolchildren to celebrate her birthday.[82][84]

Oaklands manor in Toronto, Ontario

Mary McCormick visited Canada in 1904[85][86] and remained in Toronto for months.[86] She noticed the Oaklands manor on Avenue Road during her stay[85][86] and her family bought the property from the family of Senator John Macdonald[87] in November 1905[85][86][88] as a summer residence[88] for her.[86] By 1908, she occupied the estate[89] where her home held indoor gatherings for the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA),[90][91][92][93] the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU)[94] and the Women's Christian Medical College.[95][96] The grounds of her manor held outdoor garden parties every June that raised funds for the benefit of the Girl Guides of Canada,[97][98] the Toronto General Hospital[99][100] and the Home and School Association of Brown Public School on Avenue Road.[101][102][103][104][105] In June 1916, her estate had the largest fête ever held in Canada,[106][107][108] a four-day festival[106][107][108] that was opened by Ontario Premier William Hearst[109][110] for the Canadian Red Cross Society[107][108] at the mid-point of the First World War.

She visited Cohasset, Massachusetts, in 1910 and leased the Caravels manor on Nichols Road.[111] Fond of music herself,[69][82][111] she accommodated musicians from the Boston Symphony Orchestra during her stay at the manor that year.[111] Her family then acquired the property from industrialist Albert Cameron Burrage the following year[111] as her seaside residence.[112] The Caravels manor served as a layover during her travels between Huntsville and Toronto[113] as the McCormicks made annual family visits to Cohasset at the end of June.[114]  

After the death of her mother on July 5, 1923,[115][116] Mary McCormick moved back to California in 1924.[3][4][117][118] The property at 1400 Hillcrest Avenue in Pasadena[119][120] was purchased by the McCormicks from the family of oil magnate Frank Whitney Emery[119] as her primary residence.[121] She was placed under the care of Dr. Adolf Meyer,[122][123] a psychiatrist who was retained in 1927 for five years by her younger sister, Anita McCormick Blaine.[122]

In 1928, the McCormick family acquired a cliffside property in Los Angeles on Alma Real Drive in the Huntington Palisades community near Santa Monica that became her summer home[121] known as the Quelindo manor.[3][4][82][124] Her estate in Toronto was sold to the Brothers of the Christian Schools in 1931 for the purpose of establishing a campus for De La Salle College[125][126] and her manor in Huntsville was sold at auction in 1932 and became a hotel that year.[127]

She hired symphony orchestras to play for her[3][4][119][121] and kept three musicians among her retinue of 30 household servants[3][82][119] as she divided her time between the two California estates.[119] In May 1938, she was ill at the Quelindo manor[128] and unable to attend the wedding of her younger brother, Harold Fowler McCormick, to his nurse, Adah Wilson, that was held at her other home in Pasadena.[128][129]

Bedridden[82] by an illness in her final three months,[4][82] Mary McCormick died at the Quelindo manor on May 24, 1941, at the age of 80.[3][4][82][124][130] Her belongings in California were sold at auction[119][121] and her net worth, after all inheritance taxes and expenses had been deducted, was US$6,550,802 in 1942.[71][130] She was buried with other members of the McCormick family at Graceland Cemetery in Chicago.