In the mid-nineteenth century, lawyers riding the eighth judicial circuit through Mt. Pulaski often endured crude accommodations unless a prosperous resident took them in, and in April 1851 circuit judge David Davis wrote his wife a scathing account of the Mt. Pulaski House Hotel, where Abraham Lincoln, Stuart, and others from Springfield were staying amid dirt, greasy furnishings, and horrible food. Lincoln himself seldom complained about the rough conditions he and his companions met on circuit travels. Lincoln also drafted the original legislative bill creating Logan County, which joined the Eighth judicial circuit in 1839 and became the primary center of his traveling law practice. When court came to town, the area around the courthouse square filled with commotion as lawyers shouted in the second-floor courtroom so loudly that newcomers sometimes feared a fire, riot, or murder was underway, and one account recalled an attorney standing within arm's length of the jury, exerting his voice to the utmost while making physical motions that endangered the jurors' eyes. Lizzie Lushbaugh later vividly remembered Lincoln visiting her father's Mt. Pulaski home during circuit court, recalling his rumpled hair, his habit of running his long fingers through it, and her own task of brushing flies away from the table because there were no insect screens. Lincoln was also a friend of Jebez Capps, one of Mt. Pulaski's earliest pioneers, whose family at first slept on beds of cut prairie grass and cooked over the hole of an old wolf's den.