Every town has an origin story. McCormick's happens to involve a pack of foxhounds.
As the story goes, a farmer named William Dorn had spent the better part of fifteen years chasing rumors of gold across this stretch of the South Carolina Piedmont. In February 1852, his dogs turned up something unusual while out hunting near what's now downtown — and Dorn had found the vein he'd been looking for. It turned out to be one of the richest gold strikes in South Carolina history, second only to a mine up in Lancaster County. Over the next several years, Dorn pulled close to a million dollars in gold out of the ground.
A settlement grew up around the mine, known simply as Dorn's Gold Mines. When the vein finally ran dry in the late 1850s, it could have been the end of the story. Instead, in 1869, the property was bought by Cyrus McCormick — the inventor of the mechanical reaper, and a man with money to spend chasing his own gold ambitions. McCormick never struck it rich the way Dorn had, but he did something more lasting: he helped bring a rail line to the settlement and gave land for a proper town. In 1882, that town was incorporated and took his name.
The rest of downtown's story is a familiar one for small Southern towns — a fire in 1884 leveled most of the original business district, and the town rebuilt, brick by brick, into the Main Street that's still standing today.
The mines themselves have been quiet for well over a century now, but the town never really let go of where it started. It's there in the name of the festival every September, and in Heritage Gold Mine Park, where the old mine site is preserved and visitors can still pan for gold the way Dorn's crews once did.
There's more to the story than fits here — the mine's later years, the different hands it passed through, how the town grew up around it. Worth digging into if the topic catches you, which it tends to.