In March 1830, the tiny hamlet of Decatur, Illinois, with a dozen log cabins, was greeted by a caravan of thirteen people, the family of Thomas and Sarah Bush Johnston Lincoln. It was the first time Abraham Lincoln saw the place near which he would live for the next year. Coming from Indiana at the urging of Lincoln's second cousin John Hanks, the family made an overnight camp in the town square, then settled in separate parts of the county, with Abraham, his father Thomas, his stepbrother John Johnston, and his stepmother Sarah moving to a homestead along the Sangamon River about eight miles west of Decatur. After Lincoln became successful as a lawyer riding the Eighth Circuit, he pointed out the approximate location of that first night's camp to fellow lawyers. Because Lincoln arrived there first, Decatur maintained ties to him for the longest period of any Illinois city during the next thirty-one years of his life in the state, longer even than Springfield or Vandalia. When Lincoln arrived in Illinois, it was still a frontier of western migration, and the Decatur region was only slowly being settled by immigrants from Kentucky, Indiana, and other states, with many areas still uninhabited. Until railroads came to Decatur in the 1850's, the city remained underdeveloped and small in population compared with other county seats such as Bloomington. While living in the area, Lincoln earned his livelihood as a farm day-laborer, often working land owned by Hanks relatives, clearing and breaking ground for crops, and often receiving goods and services rather than money. On one occasion he split rails for James Hanks and William Miller and received clothing in exchange. In Illinois, now twenty-one years old, he could for the first time keep the rewards of his labor and make decisions for himself, rather than turning over what he earned to his father.