Kelley’s Tavern began as Strong’s Inn, a mud-mortar log cabin built here by Cyrus Strong in the 1830's at Strong’s Ford on the Bloomington or State Road between Danville and Urbana. Joseph Kelley rented the inn in November 1848, purchased it in 1849, expanded it, and operated it as a bar, inn, grocery, ferry crossing over the Salt Fork, and meeting place that became the nucleus of a town; after he was appointed postmaster in May 1851, the post office was named Saint Joseph. The tavern served westward migrants, local business, and other travelers on the muddy road, where weather often forced overnight stays between the county seats. From the late 1840's to 1859, attorney Abraham Lincoln regularly traveled this route while defending clients in the spring and fall sessions of the Eighth Judicial Circuit, and one of his frequent stops was Joseph Kelley’s Tavern, an inn of excellent reputation in a cluster of dwellings at the ford. There Lincoln sat in his favorite wide hickory rocking chair with a buffalo robe over it and told stories around the fire; William Starbuck and his father remembered hearing him there. Judge David Davis, who served on the Eighth Judicial Circuit from 1848 until 1862, often lay on the tavern floor listening to Lincoln’s stories by the fire and recalled that Lincoln’s presence on the circuit was watched for with interest and never failed to produce joy or hilarity. Davis later managed Lincoln’s rise to the presidency and was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1862, where he wrote Ex Parte Milligan in 1866. The four-room tavern that stood on the spot was demolished in 1914.