Lincoln arrived by carriage in this prairie hamlet on a bitterly cold and windy day, wrapped in a buffalo robe. He was on a speaking tour, testing the concepts which he made famous a few months later at New York's Cooper Institute. An eyewitness recalled listening to him with about 40 people in a small courthouse which once stood just west of the present building. He remembered being "unconsciously and irresistibly drawn by the clearness and closeness of his argument."