Early settlers at McCormick's Creek worked hard to build lives for themselves and their children. Although John McCormick first owned this land, it is believed he never set foot on it. After his death, the land was divided among his children, with two sons taking portions along the creek and building mills, while his daughter Nancy received the land north and east of the creek. There Nancy and her husband, Jesse Peden, established a farm, building a log cabin and barn and raising cattle, sheep, and grain. Before the sheep were taken to market, they were washed in the creek to remove oil from their wool, and Nancy regularly walked to the White River to sell butter and eggs to passing flatboats, while a spring house kept perishable foods cool. Their son Tom later took over the farm, and after the log barn burned in 1857, he replaced it with a large barn on a limestone base with sixty-four-foot hickory timbers long enough to need no central support, allowing wheat to be threshed on the barn floor as a team of twelve horses circled over the harvested wheat to separate grain from chaff. The barn's stonework, still visible, was quarried near the Statehouse Quarry and assembled by a mason from England, with "1857" visible on the stonework. John McCormick had been a captain in the Revolutionary War, and after the war, when the young country was rich in land but poor in cash, veterans could mark off desired property; he recorded his acreage at the Vincennes Land Office on September 1, 1816.