Agricultural life shaped Hancock County from the earliest days of Anglo-American settlement. Although Abraham Lincoln seemed indifferent to agriculture and never farmed again after leaving his father's home, he came to respect the enlightened practice of scientific husbandry that characterized much of American agriculture, including in nearby Fountain Green where his uncle and several cousins were farmers. He urged deeper plowing, analysis of soils, experiments with manures, and varieties of seeds, delighted in labor-saving farm implements, and championed the application of steam power to farm work, becoming an important supporter of the agricultural land grant college system. Before the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society, he said that farmers were the most numerous class and that their interest was the largest and most worthy to be cherished and cultivated. In Hancock County, the original Commissioner's Court Seal adopted in 1833, featuring a plow and steamboat, reflected the dream of burgeoning agrarian markets that motivated early Anglo-American settlers. Farmers used oxen or horses to pull plows that turned over the prairie, with oxen valued for steadiness and strength and horses preferred for speed; as late as 1835, settlers were still feeding their horses grass cut from the open prairie where the courthouse now stands. On June 27, 1844, fourteen-year-old William R. Hamilton was ordered to keep watch from the courthouse cupola toward Nauvoo while the Carthage Greys guarded Joseph and Hyrum Smith in the Carthage jail two blocks northwest. Encamped on the courthouse square, the Greys were apparently unprepared when Hamilton later shouted that a body of armed men was approaching the jail, and he later said he believed officers and some privates were working for delay, with the company not reaching the jail until after the mob had completed its work.