The Stone Arch Bridge east of the present highway stood on the Galena Road, once the most important trail in northern Illinois, along which innumerable people traveled north each spring to the lead mines near Galena and many returned south in the fall, a movement likened to that of the fish called Sucker, from which the state received its nickname. This section of the road from Dixon was surveyed in 1830 as the road from Woodbine Springs to Ogee's Ferry, later Dixon's Ferry and now Dixon, replacing the longer 1825 Kellogg's Trail and the 1826 Boles’ Trail. Roads from Peoria and Chicago joined at Dixon and continued as one to Galena, with mail and stagecoach lines using the Peoria-Galena route as early as 1830 and the Chicago-Galena route by 1834. At this place the road intersected the earlier Gratiot’s Trail, which also ran from Dixon to Galena but extended farther north to avoid rough terrain. During the Black Hawk War in 1832, militia and regular army troops marched on both trails. Abraham Lincoln, serving as a private in the company of Captain Elijah Iles, camped overnight nearby on June 8 and 12, and later, as a private in the independent spy company of Jacob M. Early, made a forced march to Kellogg’s Grove near Kent, arriving on June 26, the day after the last battle fought in Illinois during that war. Isaac Chambers, the first settler of Ogle County at Buffalo Grove near Polo and also of Lima Township in Carroll County, operated a stagecoach inn nearby and a sawmill on Elkhorn Creek two miles to the southeast.