The Rise and Fall of Case, The Threshing Machine King

From One Machine to a Global Empire — Then Gone Jerome Increase Case was born in 1819 on a farm in upstate New York, where harvesting wheat by hand produced six bushels per person per day. By the time he died in 1891, his company was selling machines across Argentina, Russia, and Europe, and had won first place at the 1878 Paris World's Fair. This is the full story of J.I. Case — how a 22-year-old with six threshers bought on credit built one of the most dominant agricultural machinery companies in American history, and how 150 years of competition, debt, and one catastrophic gamble slowly stripped it of its independence. We cover the founding of the Racine Threshing Machine Works, the partnership that turned a small shop into a $1 million corporation, the steam engine era that made Case the most prolific engine builder in North America, and the moment Jerome Case personally traveled to Minnesota to burn a $1,000 machine rather than leave a farmer with equipment that did not work. We also cover the fall — the $236 million debt crisis of 1959, the Tenneco takeover of 1967, the Soviet grain embargo that collapsed American farm sales in 1979, the $430 million purchase of International Harvester that was supposed to save Case and instead accelerated its end, and the 1994 stock offering that ended 152 years of independence. The Case name still exists. Case IH is the world's second-largest agricultural equipment brand. Case CE is the world's third-largest construction equipment brand. But the company Jerome Case built from scratch in Wisconsin is gone — absorbed, restructured, and merged into a multinational corporation. This is the rise and fall of the Threshing Machine King.