Abraham Lincoln handled several notable legal matters connected with Mt. Pulaski. An illustration by Lloyd Ostendorf imagined a scene from the town's cast iron tombstone case, in which two local residents separately sued Reuben Miller for fraudulently selling them rights to an iron tombstone patent they later judged frivolous and of no benefit to society. Judge David Davis ruled against Miller in the trial court, but on appeal in the Illinois Supreme Court in Springfield in 1859, Lincoln succeeded in having the case sent back for retrial. The dispute returned to the Supreme Court twice more and was not finally resolved until after Lincoln became president, when Miller ultimately lost. Much of the record of Lincoln's local practice was destroyed when the recently completed Logan County courthouse in Lincoln burned in 1857, so most surviving knowledge of his Mt. Pulaski work comes from Illinois State Supreme Court records in Springfield, which often preserve information about trial proceedings held in the local courtroom before appeal. In two important county-seat disputes, Lincoln opposed his former law partners Stephen T. Logan and John Todd Stuart. After Mt. Pulaski replaced Postville as county seat, Postville landowners hired Logan and Stuart to recover the value of land they had donated to the county, but Lincoln successfully defended the county by showing that the Postville men had been fairly compensated. A few years later, when the new city of Lincoln became county seat, Mt. Pulaski hired Lincoln's old partners and sued the county to block the change, and Lincoln again defended the county successfully. Another unusual matter was the Horological Cradle case, involving a land swap for a patent on a mechanical cradle promoted as a wonder that could rock itself after being wound up. Lincoln represented local patent purchasers who discovered that the patent covered only the cradle's ornamentation, not its mechanical design, and he reportedly delighted the courtroom by demonstrating how it worked, though Judge David Davis was said to have been puzzled about how to stop it, prompting Lincoln to joke that it would not stop until it ran down.