While in Hillsboro, Abraham Lincoln often visited his good friends Joseph and Jane Eccles, known as Uncle Joe and Aunt Jane, at their home on the corner of Berry and East Water streets, and the Eccles couple later visited President and Mrs. Lincoln twice at the White House. Lincoln often stretched his long legs on the steps of the Eccles home, and after the house was demolished one of those steps was saved and entered the collection of the Historical Society of Montgomery County. During his time in the State Legislature from 1834 to 1842, Lincoln traveled from New Salem to Vandalia, the state capital, with an overnight stop in Hillsboro, where he stayed at the Blockburger Inn and swapped stories with lawyers and townspeople. His closest friend there was Joseph Eccles, a justice of the peace, assistant assessor, deputy collector of U.S. revenue, and recruiting officer for Union troops in Hillsboro. Lincoln and Eccles corresponded many times on political matters, and Eccles convinced Lincoln to come to Hillsboro to make a campaign speech against Senator Stephen A. Douglas. In 1858, while Lincoln and Douglas were running for the United States senate, Douglas spoke at the Hillsboro Fairgrounds on August 2 and Lincoln spoke there on September 9, one month apart, while their famous debates in seven other Illinois towns took place from August 21 to October 15, 1858. Railroads first came to Illinois in the 1830s, and as a state legislator Lincoln strongly supported government grants to help fund the Illinois Central Railroad. Hillsboro also strongly backed railroads: in 1849 a meeting there drew 6,000 people interested in locating a rail line in the town, in 1851 county residents voted to buy $50,000 in railroad bonds, and on July 4, 1855, the first train of the St. Louis, Alton and Terre Haute Railroad arrived at the first Hillsboro depot at the foot of Taylorville Road, a line Lincoln later rode when coming to Hillsboro.