Taylorville, the last county seat on Abraham Lincoln’s circuit route, was part of Illinois’ Eighth Judicial Circuit from 1839 until Christian County joined the Seventeenth Judicial Circuit in 1853, ending Lincoln’s usual twice-yearly June and November visits. Circuit Judge David Davis recalled pleasant accommodations there with Lincoln and Mr. Thorton and remembered the town as prettily laid out and tastefully arranged with trees and shrubs, though pigs rooting beneath the courthouse floorboards sometimes disrupted proceedings. In one oft-repeated episode, Lincoln reportedly demanded a “writ of quietus” to abate the hog nuisance. Pigs also figured in an 1842 case Lincoln argued there for James Masterson, whose four hundred pigs escaped after a careless boy let cows break down a holding-pen fence; Masterson lost seventy pigs worth $350, but Lincoln lost the suit when a jury found the boy’s father not liable for the son’s negligence. Such scenes may have recalled Lincoln’s childhood pet pig in Kentucky, with which he played hide-and-seek and whose slaughter he later remembered as traumatic. A two-story wood-frame courthouse was built on the public square in 1840 on twelve stone pillars that raised the floor eighteen inches above the ground, allowing pigs to get underneath, and a local resident later remembered Lincoln telling many stories on the woodpile north of the courthouse after court adjourned. In 1854 officials removed the old frame courthouse, though it was preserved and may still be visited today.