Abraham Lincoln spent six months each year traveling Illinois’s Eighth Judicial Circuit, where he formed close friendships with fellow lawyers such as Judge David Davis and Ward Hill Lamon, sharing courtrooms, meals, camaraderie, and often lodging, and Davis later said Lincoln was as happy there as anywhere. Davis, who presided over the circuit and also managed Lincoln’s campaign, and Lamon helped orchestrate Lincoln’s presidential nomination by securing the Republican Convention for Illinois and packing the hall with Lincoln supporters using counterfeit tickets. In Clinton, young Vespasian “Pash” Warner listened as Lincoln, Davis, and Lamon talked on the porch of the Barnett Tavern, and after Davis at first objected to Lamon’s plan to fetch whiskey because of a recent hungover appearance in court at Mt. Pulaski, Lincoln persuaded him to give Lamon a second chance; Lamon returned with whiskey and the men continued their discussion upstairs, while Lincoln himself never drank though he enjoyed such company. Lamon later became one of Lincoln’s staunchest supporters and accompanied him as a bodyguard on his journey to Washington, D. C., after his election as President. Vespasian Warner had come to Clinton as a toddler in 1842 when his father, Dr. John Warner, moved there from Mt. Pleasant, now Farmer City, and to support his medical practice the family, with Harry P. Merriman, ran a hotel on the west side of the square where Eighth Judicial Circuit lawyers could stay and eat for $1.50 a week; after prospering, Dr. Warner left the hotel business and built Clinton’s first brick residence across from the Barnett Tavern. As an adolescent, Vespasian Warner lingered around the tavern in the evenings to hear the judge and lawyers whom he then admired and later remembered as great men. Lincoln’s attachment to books began in boyhood, when he said he read every book he could find within thirty miles of his Indiana home, walked miles to borrow books, and, according to his cousin Dennis Hanks, carried a book even while plowing and read whenever the horses rested. In New Salem he taught himself law from borrowed books, sometimes walking fourteen miles to Springfield to get them and reading thirty to forty pages on the way home. He became the first person to check out a book from the Illinois State Library when it opened in Springfield in December 1839, and as President he frequently used the Library of Congress. Lincoln also found a fellow book lover in Clinton’s first resident lawyer, C. H. Moore, whose private library was the largest in downstate Illinois in the nineteenth century. Before his death Moore commissioned plans for a public library, and his son-in-law and law partner, Congressman Vespasian Warner, donated land and funds to fulfill that vision. The Vespasian Warner Public Library opened in 1908 with the C. H. Moore Rare Book Collection and still preserves more than 5,000 volumes from Moore’s library, including a book inscribed in Lincoln’s handwriting and given to Moore shortly before Lincoln left Illinois to become President. Vespasian Warner later built his residence next to the library, a large brick house east of it on Center Street, completed in 1912.