Before the Illinois Central Railroad arrived, geese gathered at a pond in this area. The railroad cleared the pond and gave the land to the Congregationalist church, now the Community United Church of Christ, whose sanctuary was completed near University and First Street in 1856 and became known as the Goose Pond Church. In this unfinished church, Abraham Lincoln addressed a crowd in June 1856, and possibly again later that year, appealing to the congregation’s strong antislavery and abolitionist views to win support for Fremont, the new Republican Party’s presidential candidate. During Lincoln’s 1858 campaign against Stephen Douglas, he was greeted at the Doane house by an enthusiastic crowd. After Douglas spoke at the fairgrounds in Urbana on September 23, Lincoln spoke there the following day. Judge Cunningham recalled that people began arriving early, and by ten o’clock a procession led by bands and more than sixty young women on horseback, thirty-two representing the states of the Union, marched to the Doane house to escort Lincoln to the fairgrounds. The Doane house, an inn that served as the Depot building, stood north of the Goose Pond Church on the east side of the railroad tracks. A Chicago newspaper reported that attendance at Lincoln’s speech was nearly or quite as large as at Douglas’s demonstration the day before, with enthusiasm ten times greater. Lincoln also formed friendships in West Urbana, later Champaign, staying with the Baddeleys, prominent storekeepers at Randolph and Hill, dining with Mark Carley, owner of the first grain elevator in the new Depot town, and passing the newly opened Cattle Bank, where his friend from rural Mahomet, B. G. Harris, was a partner, as he was escorted to the fairgrounds.