Artois Hamilton established Carthage's first inn, the Hamilton House, at this location in 1835 and ran it until 1851, when his wife, two children, and two sisters died in a local cholera epidemic. Abraham Lincoln probably stayed there when he came to Carthage in 1839 to serve as the defendant's counsel in the Fraim murder trial, his only known court case in Hancock County, and he later handled local cases on appeal in the Illinois State Supreme Court, including Moore v. Hamilton in 1845, in which he persuaded the court to throw out a Hancock County jury verdict favoring Hamilton, though Hamilton won again when the case was retried in Carthage in 1846 with different lawyers. Lincoln apparently did not return to Carthage until the 1858 Senate race against Stephen A. Douglas, and Hamilton, a Democrat whose son William R. Hamilton ran that year for Hancock County sheriff on Douglas's ticket, most likely did not vote for Lincoln. Many Lincoln-era dignitaries stayed at the inn, including John Hay of nearby Warsaw, who later became a confidential secretary to President Lincoln during the Civil War, served as Secretary of War under Presidents William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt, and wrote a famous account of the assassination of Joseph Smith for Atlantic Monthly. The Hamilton House was also central to events surrounding Joseph Smith's final days: as local militia units such as the Carthage Grays pressed to see Smith after his arrival with his party just before midnight on June 24, 1844, Governor Thomas Ford and many apostate Mormon enemies were already staying there, Smith's company spent the night there and much of the next day before being confined in the Carthage Jail on the evening of June 25, and after Joseph and Hyrum Smith were murdered at the jail two days later, Hamilton brought their bodies back to the inn, prepared pine board boxes for them, and helped transport them to Nauvoo the next morning.