Twenty-two years before Abraham Lincoln, the sixteenth president, died of a gunshot wound to the head after restoring the Union, he was a disheveled thirty-four-year-old country lawyer who traveled on horseback through the prairie and wilderness of the counties that made up the Eighth Illinois Judicial Circuit Court. His journey covered more than four hundred miles and included Hanover, later named Metamora, in Woodford County. Court sessions were held in the spring and the fall, and Lincoln participated in most through 1858. He handled more than seventy cases there, including debt and business suits, eviction, paternity, gambling, perjury, trespass, rights of way cases, and several guardianships. He defended two abolitionists charged with harboring slaves and two people accused of murder. Local legend also holds that he mediated disputes in Metamora Square to discourage litigation because he often considered court a waste of time and money. Many of his cases came before his friend and future Supreme Court justice, Judge David Davis. In 1858, the same year Lincoln finished work on his last case in Metamora and delivered his last speech there between his Charleston and Galesburg debates with Judge Stephen Douglas for the Illinois Senate seat, a photograph likely taken by Roderick Cole in Peoria became a favorite of Lincoln and was later reproduced on campaign ribbons of 1860, when he ran against Douglas for the presidency. On October 10, 1857, Lincoln attempted to defend Melissa Goings, a seventy-year-old woman accused of killing her abusive seventy-seven-year-old husband, Roswell, earlier that spring with a piece of firewood. Although town legend claims that most people felt sorry for Melissa and did not want to prosecute her, she escaped from the sheriff's custody, and no effort was made to bring her back.