Freeport’s first permanent recognition of its role in the Lincoln-Douglas Debates came in 1903, when the Freeport Woman’s Club secured a large stone from Devil’s Lake, Wisconsin, placed it near the site of the 1858 debate, and added a plaque on the importance of the Freeport Debate in American history. On June 3, 1903, President Theodore Roosevelt came to Freeport to dedicate the boulder and delivered brief remarks honoring Abraham Lincoln’s words, the men whose deeds upheld them, and the duty to hand that heritage down unsullied to future generations. A small plaque was later added reading, “Dedicated by President Roosevelt June 3, 1903.” In 1940, when United States Army Colonel Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., visited Freeport and saw the boulder his father had dedicated thirty-seven years earlier, he suggested changing the smaller plaque because another Roosevelt was then in the White House, and the Freeport Woman’s Club replaced it with the one now on the boulder. In 1929, Freeport industrialist William T. Rawleigh gave the citizens of Freeport the statue Lincoln the Debater for Taylor Park, where the bronze work by sculptor Leonard Crunelle still stands.