While traveling the Eighth Judicial Circuit, Abraham Lincoln spent several months each year away from home and stayed overnight in DeWitt County homes, taverns, and hotels that ranged from the palatial Argo House to George Hill’s rustic log cabin and the often overcrowded Barnett Tavern. According to legend, one of his favorite places to stay was the Richter house in Marion, now DeWitt, owned by John and Ann Richter, easterners from Philadelphia who moved to Springfield in 1830 and to Marion in 1840. Mrs. Richter became known for her hospitality, and her home, with clean feather beds, fine china, and good meals, was a favored stop for men of the circuit including Judge Treat, David Davis, Leonard Swett, Ashael Gridley, Samuel H. Treat, Clifton H. Moore, and Lincoln. Lincoln’s lodging experiences in DeWitt County were not always pleasant, however, and on at least one occasion he awoke with bedbugs, though David Davis remarked that Lincoln never complained about the greasy tables, dirty linens, bug-infested beds, and other unsanitary conditions that often troubled circuit travelers. In Marion in 1854, nine local women joined by women from Springfield attacked George Tanner’s saloon in a crusade against whiskey, rolling barrels into the street, destroying kegs, and pouring out the liquor. Charged at the DeWitt County Courthouse with unlawfully destroying ten gallons of whiskey valued at five dollars, they were defended by Abraham Lincoln and John T. Stewart, who argued that they were moral women acting against the evils of alcohol in the spirit of the Boston Tea Party. They lost the case and were fined two dollars each, although local lore held that the money was never collected. Strong opposition to liquor licenses had existed in DeWitt County from its organization in 1839, but alcohol sales continued, drinking establishments multiplied, and temperance became an increasingly charged issue. Lincoln, who had sold whiskey during his brief tavern venture in New Salem, later became a teetotaler who spoke to temperance societies without joining one, and by October 1854 the DeWitt Courier carried notices for the Sons of Temperance, which met weekly in the same courthouse where the Marion women were tried.