On August 19, 1861, U.S. Congressman and future Major General John A. Logan delivered a pivotal speech on this site that helped keep the region loyal to the North during the Civil War. As remembered by Mrs. John A. Logan in a February 1913 Cosmopolitan Magazine article, Luke Sanders, an old fifer who had served in the home regiment that had gone to the Mexican War, came forward from the crowd at a signal, offered Logan his hand as a volunteer, and played a patriotic air on his fife, while Gabriel Cox, a former member of the same regiment's drum corps, beat an old drum. Logan, unaware of the plan, was overcome when he saw his old comrade approach, but at the sound of the fife and drum the line of volunteers quickly filled. Logan then jumped down from the wagon, gave the command "Forward! March!" and led more than 110 men around Marion Square, enough for more than a full company, all enrolled for three years or during the war. Men who had been boasting and threatening violence only hours earlier scattered before the determined attitude of the new soldiers. Logan declared, "The time has come when a man must be for or against his country, not for or against his state, I, for one, shall stand or fall for this Union and shall this day enroll for war."