The stone farmhouse just east on Colchester Road operated as a tavern in the late 1790s and by 1800 was known as the White Pump Drovers Tavern. Drovers moved animals such as sheep, cattle, and hogs along roadways to markets, and Colchester was the Fairfax County seaport, predating Alexandria. On November 30, 1864, Union General Wesley Merritt bivouacked here during his Loudoun Valley barn-burning raid, and local farmer John Dillon provided Merritt's soldiers with two barrels of hard cider; Dillon's barn was not burned. Wagons stopped at the tavern as late as 1915.