Since 1856, Beecher Hall has served as the headquarters of two Illinois College men's societies, the Sigma Pi Society and the Phi Alpha Society. Both elected Abraham Lincoln to honorary membership in 1859, and Lincoln later had close contact with a number of their members. Dr. Newton Bateman of Jacksonville became a close friend in the months before Lincoln left Springfield for Washington; Barbour Lewis, a Jacksonville lawyer, was called by Lincoln "my particular friend"; Lincoln appointed Dr. William Jayne, a Springfield physician, governor of Dakota Territory; and Charles Philbrick served as Lincoln's private secretary in the White House. These connections were part of Lincoln's many important ties to Jacksonville and Illinois College. Lincoln is shown as he appeared on the night he delivered a lecture in downtown Jacksonville in February 1859, sponsored by the Phi Alpha Society to benefit its library in Beecher Hall. The 1983 painting by Lincoln author and artist Lloyd Ostendorf hangs in the Phi Alpha Main Meeting Room. Beecher Hall, built in 1829-1830, was the first college building erected in Illinois. It was first used as the college chapel and lecture room, housed the library, provided dormitory space on its upper floors, and later, on the third floor in the 1840s, housed the state's first medical school. In the 1880s the building was named for Dr. Edward Beecher, the college's first president and a member of the Beecher family, which also included Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin. A painting of Beecher Hall was commissioned by the U.S. Postal Service when it marked the early 1990s restoration of the building by issuing a nineteen-cent postal card in 1993.