Abraham Lincoln handled at least 147 divorce cases during his twenty-five years as a lawyer, including a Shelby County case involving divorce and the ownership of land. William Stewardson and Mary Jane Dawson, both English immigrants, married in 1848, and she bought forty-three acres with money she had brought into the marriage. After two years the marriage fell apart, William left to live with his son from a previous marriage, and Mary Jane sold some of William’s possessions and bought a forty-acre tract. In 1852 Mary Jane hired Lincoln and sought a divorce on grounds of desertion, while William answered that she was impossible to live with and constantly berated him. A jury found for Mary Jane and granted her $50 per year alimony, but left unresolved ownership of the two parcels of land. In another lawsuit the next year, Lincoln again represented her to settle the land question, and the court reduced her alimony to $30, ruled that she should keep the land bought with her money, and ordered that she transfer to William the land bought with his money. Dissatisfied with the Shelby County Circuit Court decision, Mary Jane continued to employ Lincoln and appealed to the Illinois Supreme Court in one of three Shelby County cases he handled in Springfield, but the Supreme Court agreed that she had received a fair settlement. The land lay midway between Shelbyville and what is now Strasburg. After the Illinois Supreme Court case, Mary Jane Stewardson sold her forty-three acres to her stepson, William Stewardson, Jr., and moved to Peoria, where she died in 1883. William Stewardson remained in Shelby County until his death in 1864. William Stewardson, Jr. later accumulated substantial landholdings and donated a tract that became the village of Stewardson in 1874. In early Illinois, where paper money fluctuated wildly in value and hard money was scarce, land was a valuable commodity, and although a married woman usually had no independent right to buy and sell land because her legal status was assumed by her husband, Mary Jane, as an abandoned wife, was forced to act independently and invested in real estate.