The house on Fayette Street known today as the McCormick House was built around 1800 by a man named John Barnett. Mr. Barnett, a shoemaker, built a log cabin on a stone foundation on this Fayette Street property. The log cabin consisted of a kitchen in the basement with a walk-in fireplace on a dirt floor, one room on the main floor surrounded by a lean-to on one side and a porch on the other, and one room upstairs. The house was later owned and occupied by Thomas McCormick, also a shoemaker, and seven members of his family. Both the 1860 census and the 1870 census list Mr. McCormick and his family as the residents of the Fayette Street property, so we know that this is one of only a few buildings in Haymarket that was not burned during the Civil War in 1862. Walter Macomber, an architect specializing in historic preservation, bought the house at a tax sale in about 1950. Mr. Macomber initiated a series of renovations designed to modernize and enlarge the house, including: stabilizing the structure; installing plumbing and electricity; closing in the lean-to to create a dining room; and adding a kitchen, bathroom, utility room and bedroom onto the main floor. In the early 1960s Elizabeth Cobb, daughter of the minister of St. Paul’s Church at that time, lived across the street from this house in the church rectory with her family. Ms. Cobb purchased the house from Mr. Macomber in 1963 and lives there today. | 
