Democratic Sentinel, Volume 8, Number 5, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 29 February 1884 — Lincoln Pleading Under the Trees. [ARTICLE]

Lincoln Pleading Under the Trees.

A correspondent of the Springfield (Ill.) State Journal tells this story of Abraham Lincoln: “About four miles north of Mount Pulaski, on the farm of Joseph Beam, stands a white-oak tree which once served as a temple of justice, where Linooln practiced law. The eld Dement mill-stand, with its dam was the first built on Salt Greek. Dement’s rights were encroached upon by a dam built a few miles below for the Spence mill. » The water of the dam below backed up to the Dement dam and stopped its great wheel. Dement brought suit, and employed Lincoln to prosecute the case. This was in 1840. A Justice of the Peace, fresh from his plow on the prairie, and bubbling over with law and native justice, played the part of Judge. Twelve of the best men to be found in all the surrounding country were made jurors, and the case was opened to them, seated gravely in a row on the ground in the shade of the tree. When the evidence was all in, Mr. Lincoln made one of his peculiar speeches, full of force, wit, apt anecdotes, and ridicule. The jury deliberated a short time and brought in a verdict in favor of Mr. Lincoln’s client, and prononnoed the lower dam an encroachment on Demenfs rights. The

case gave Lincoln a high place in public estimation in that locality, a position which he never lost, and the tree is still known throughout the neighborhood as Lincoln’s tree. ”