Beginning in 1730, land that became White House Farm passed from John and Isaac Van Meter, who had received 40,000 acres in Berkeley County, Virginia, to Jost Hite, and in 1740 Dr. John McCormick bought 395 acres there and built a two-room home for his family. George Washington surveyed the farm for McCormick in 1752. After Dr. McCormick's death in 1768, his youngest son Andrew inherited the farm and, with his wife Nancy, supplied food, lodging, and horses to Washington's troops during the Revolutionary War; afterward they operated an ordinary serving travelers between Winchester and Harpers Ferry. In 1807 Andrew McCormick sold the farm to John Locke while reserving a quarter-acre family graveyard, and George Locke continued managing the ordinary as the White House Tavern. During the Civil War, the springhouse and farmhouse owned by Eleanor Locke Morrow, her husband, and Joseph Morrow were sketched by James E. Taylor, the spring supplied water to Union and Confederate troops, and Major Harry Gilmore later recounted a fatal clash there between his Confederate troops and Union forces led by Captain Somers. In the 1930s through 1950s the farm supported a dairy herd, and in 1979 the farmhouse, springhouse, and three other structures on the reduced forty-acre property were added to the National Register of Historic Places; after years of decline, the springhouse was restored in 2001 with preservation funding and local support.