John G. Shastid moved his family from New Salem to Pittsfield in 1836, where he had been a neighbor of Abraham Lincoln. Although Pittsfield was the county seat, it then had only six houses, and John bought one of them. Finding it too small, he built a larger white frame house in the same yard in 1838. A farmer with only three months of formal schooling, John was nevertheless literate and valued learning; his grandson remembered that he knew almost all of the New Testament and Fox's Book of Martyrs by heart. A man of few words, he deeply moved his family when he gathered them to pray for Lincoln's life after hearing the president had been shot, and later that day, at age sixty-seven, he knocked senseless a young man who loudly rejoiced that Lincoln was dead. Family memories also preserved visits by Lincoln to the Shastid household in Pittsfield. Mother Shastid once showed him her flower garden, and his reply led relatives to speculate that he may have been colorblind. As a boy, Thomas W. Shastid watched Lincoln eat a platter of pigeons and later recalled hearing both Lincoln and Stephen Douglas speak in town, judging Douglas the stronger voice and Lincoln the better analyst. In another family story, Lincoln arrived just as the Shastid children awaited a meal of wild pigeons, was seated at the head of the table, and in absorbed silence ate every bird, prompting little Tom Shastid to burst into tears and call him "an old hog."