The Fort Clark Road, later called the Bloomington or State Road, was approved by the Illinois Assembly in 1826 and became an important commercial route between Danville and Urbana as the first state road into western Vermilion County, which became Champaign County in 1833. First surveyed in the 1820s from the state line to Big Grove, it was resurveyed by Moses Thomas in 1835, shifting the Salt Fork crossing from Prather’s Ford to Strong’s Ford, later Kelley’s Ford in 1849. From the late 1840s until 1859, Abraham Lincoln frequently traveled this road while defending clients on Illinois’s Eighth Judicial Circuit, an 11,000-square-mile region in 1849, staying at Kelley’s Tavern in St. Joseph or the Twin Oaks Inn in Vermilion County and sometimes traveling with Judge David Davis, whom Lincoln later appointed to the United States Supreme Court. Though well defined, the road could become impassable in spring and fall because of Champaign County’s clay soils, and it followed earlier trails made by migratory herds and native peoples across grasslands dotted with groves and ponds. In this area, Moses Thomas settled near the road, established the Union Post Office in his cabin in 1833, and with Michael D. Coffeen founded Homer at the site of his mill and dam on the Salt Fork River; the post office moved to Coffeen’s store in 1841 and was renamed Homer. An 1847 map by Samuel Augustus Mitchell showed the village of Union on the road between Danville and Urbana, along the same routes Lincoln used. Coffeen later supported the Republican Party, served as a senatorial delegate to the 1856 Republican convention, backed Lincoln’s election, and helped raise troops from Homer for the Civil War, while by 1864 Homer cast only 9 votes for McClellan. By 1856, Lincoln used the Great Western Railroad for much of his travel but still visited friends at Kelley’s Tavern, and the coming of that railroad led Homer residents in February 1855 to move their homes and businesses more than a mile on ox-drawn skids to reach the tracks, benefiting Coffeen as a nearby landowner. After the post office moved in 1841, George Ziegler Clark settled nearby and worked to clear and cultivate the prairie and groves, and the land later known as the Clark neighborhood is now partly protected and restored within Homer Lake Forest Preserve. In the twentieth century, the old road was recognized as a historic trail by the Alliance Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution and the Abraham Lincoln Circuit Marking Association, a county line marker was dedicated on October 12, 1923, Senator William B. McKinley spoke at the dedication, the Prairielands Council of the Boy Scouts also marked the trail, and a hiking trail from Homer Lake to Kickapoo State Park opened in the 1980s.