Abraham Lincoln traveled to Shelby County to argue cases while riding the Eighth Judicial Circuit, and although the county was part of that circuit in the 1840's, he often skipped Shelbyville for Charleston, where his father lived, before attending court there mostly between 1849 and 1853. He handled at least thirty-five cases in Shelby County, chiefly debt matters, including the defense of seventeen residents who had failed to make stock payments to the Terre Haute and Alton Railroad. He also defended a dozen men in three separate cases after they used vigilante justice against a man who had helped with a jailbreak, represented a woman in a divorce case, and argued many slander suits. Nearly one out of every five cases he handled in Shelbyville involved slander, and although judgments in such cases often ranged from $300 to $1,000, most successful plaintiffs remitted the awards because they sought restoration of their reputations rather than money. The Shelbyville courthouse stood in the middle of Main Street as it had in Lincoln's day, with a courtroom occupying the entire first floor, county offices on the second, and a forty-foot-square federal-style design topped by a cupola and commonly called a coffee mill because it resembled a coffee grinder; there Lincoln argued cases and debated Anthony Thornton. In 1852 Lincoln helped defend John Crockett of Shelby County on a murder charge in neighboring Moultrie County, where the jury convicted him instead of manslaughter and sentenced him to two years in the state penitentiary, after which Lincoln aided the successful effort to secure a pardon for the young man. Elliott Crockett, John Crockett's father and a nephew of Davy Crockett, gave Lincoln a promissory note for legal services but died before paying it, and in 1857 Lincoln hired Thornton and sued the estate, won the case, and recovered $64.12.