“Atchison was the first Kansas town visited by Horace Greeley. It was Sunday morning, May 15, 1859, a few days before beginning his overland journey across the continent by stage. He came through Missouri by the Hannibal & St. Joseph Railroad, thence down the Missouri river from St. Joseph on the ‘Platte Valley,’ a steamer then running to Kansas City in connection with trains on the Hannibal & St. Joseph Railroad. It was in the old Massasoit House that Greeley wrote on Kansas soil, his first letter to the _Tribune_. During the latter part of the afternoon he was driven over the city in a carriage, John A. Martin being one of the party. The city was a favorite place of Albert D. Richardson, the noted correspondent of five eastern newspapers. “It was at Atchison that Abraham Lincoln, on his first visit to Kansas, spoke to a crowded house on ‘The Issues of the Day,’ December 2, 1859, the date that old John Brown was executed in Virginia. Lincoln spoke in the Methodist church, which then stood on the hill at the corner of Fifth and Parallel streets. The little church was a frame building, dedicated in May, 1859, and overlooked a considerable portion of the city. The house afterwards became quite historic, for during the early part of the Civil war, the patriotic Rev. Milton Mahin, a stanch Union man, from Indiana, in a patriotic speech, soon after the Civil war broke out, had the nerve, and was the first minister of the Gospel in Atchison, to raise the Stars and Stripes over his house of worship.” D. W. Wilder, in his “Annals of Kansas,” one of the most wonderful books of its kind ever published, says that Abraham Lincoln arrived in Elwood, which is just across from St. Joseph, December 1, 1859, and made his speech there that evening. He was met at St. Joseph by M. W. Delahay and D. W. Wilder. The speech that Lincoln delivered at Elwood and at Atchison was the same speech that he subsequently delivered at the Cooper Institute, New York City, and was considered as one of the ablest and clearest ever delivered by an American statesman.