From 1845 to 1858, Abraham Lincoln traveled the Eighth Judicial Circuit to Monticello and lodged at the Tenbrook Hotel with other members of the bar. Lincoln and Judge David Davis were the only lawyers who traveled the complete circuit, a journey estimated at two hundred miles over muddy roads and prairie trails. According to Mrs. Caleb Tatman, Lincoln was the life of the party while the circuit court was in session at the Tenbrook Tavern Hotel, where he once persuaded children to heat a blown-up pig’s bladder in the fireplace; it burst, scattered coals across the room, and when he tried to sweep them up the broom caught fire and was ruined, after which he discovered he was overdue at court and rushed away, and a new broom had to be ordered from Springfield. The Tenbrook Hotel, the first hotel in Monticello, was built in 1839 by John P. Tenbrook, son of Abraham and Catherine Tenbrook, after John and his wife moved to Monticello in 1838; it began as a one-room cabin with a shed addition and had grown to seven or eight rooms by the time Lincoln stayed there in the 1840s and 1850s. The hotel stood where the Dairy Queen now stands. Monticello’s original courthouse, used from 1839 to 1853, was a two-room building on West Washington St. known as the Devore House or Old Fort and was also used by a tailor when court was not in session; the first Piatt County Circuit Court was held there on May 1, 1841. A second courthouse stood in the center of the Square from 1856 to 1903, and the present courthouse was built in 1903.