The McNutt House, home of physician Robert B. McNutt, is Princeton’s only antebellum dwelling and survived the fire that Colonel Walter H. Jenifer of the 8th Virginia Cavalry set on May 1, 1862, while evacuating the town to hinder the advance of Union General John C. Frémont’s Mountain Army toward the Shenandoah Valley in support of Nathaniel P. Banks against Confederate General Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson. Jenifer sent about 200 cavalrymen and militia from his 300-man command north from Princeton under Lieutenant Colonel Henry Fitzhugh, and at Camp Creek, a branch of the Bluestone River, Fitzhugh’s force clashed with Frémont’s advance guard, Lieutenant Colonel Rutherford B. Hayes’s 23rd Ohio Infantry, before withdrawing to Princeton. There Jenifer collected the supplies he could carry, burned the town, and marched south to Rocky Gap. Frémont reported that after the affair at Camp Creek, Hayes drove Jenifer’s cavalry through Princeton and that although Jenifer set fire to the place, 6 or 8 houses were saved by Hayes. One of them was the McNutt House, where Hayes, later president of the United States, made his headquarters with his aide, Sergeant William McKinley, also a future president. Jenifer, a Maryland native born in 1823, had designed and patented a cavalry saddle while serving as a lieutenant in the 2nd U.S. Cavalry in the late 1850s; Confederate authorities adopted it after the war began, but it proved unsatisfactory, leading him to sue the Confederate government for patent infringement in 1863 before later settling out of court. After losing command of the 8th Virginia Cavalry in an 1862 reorganization, he served as a cavalry inspector for the rest of the war, then joined the Egyptian army in 1870, resigned two years later because of ill health, returned to the Baltimore area, and raised Arabian horses imported from Egypt until his death in 1878.