The village of Middletown-Mahomet was platted by Daniel Porter in 1832 on the west bank of the Sangamon River near its headwaters, where a new road associated with the county seat at Urbana and a new ford helped shape the town’s location and main street. Founded as Middletown because it stood halfway on the new Danville-Bloomington Road, the community officially became Mahomet by 1840 when a post office was granted, though both names remained in use for many years. Abraham Lincoln, traveling the Eighth Judicial Circuit, visited the community under both names and commonly passed through it on his way toward Urbana, crossing the Sangamon River at Bryan’s Ford. The Bryans opened their home to travelers at the ford, and that house later became the Ohio or Nine Gal Tavern run by Thomas Davidson, where Lincoln stayed between 1853 to 1856 and was said to bounce little Jimmy Davidson on his knee. He also used the Bloomfield or Rea Tavern operated by Sarah Rea, whose low second-floor ceiling forced him to duck on the staircase. Lincoln visited the frame house of B. F. Harris from 1852 to 1854, dined there when in Middletown-Mahomet, and knew Harris as a longtime friend who went to Washington in 1861 to encourage Lincoln in his war efforts, visited Mary Todd Lincoln and the boys, and attended a cabinet meeting. Harris, an early Champaign County entrepreneur who introduced new machinery, medicines, and a sawmill to the area, became wealthy through cattle grazing and later founded the First National Bank of Champaign after serving as a silent partner in the Cattle Bank. Other early residents Lincoln personally knew included Thomas Davidson, Hezekiah Phillippe, Wiley Davis, John C. Kilgore, and James Fisher, who with Harris helped start the first Methodist church in Middletown-Mahomet, Bethel Church, on Harris’ farm. Some of those founders had heard evangelist Peter Cartwright at the headwaters of the Sangamon in the 1830s, and Cartwright later opposed Lincoln’s bid for the United States House of Representatives because Lincoln was not a churchgoer, prompting Lincoln to reply that he “never denied the truth of the Scriptures.”