In 1896, Carl Sandburg was working for Samuel K. Barlow, delivering fresh milk door-to-door. He had to be at work at 7:00 in the morning. After dressing and eating the breakfast his mother had prepared,  he walked to work in all kinds of weather.

He left the house on Berrien Street, walking west across the switching tracks of the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad. It was a dangerous thing to do, no matter the time of day. He walked past Mike O'Connor's livery stable and the Boyer broom factory on South Prairie Street.

The Knox College campus along South Street was also part of his path to work. Many mornings he would stop to read the plaque on the north wall of Old Main. He knew when it had been placed there.

It was October 7, 1896, when an estimated ten thousand people came to Galesburg for the dedication of the Soldier's Monument in Hope Cemetery. The Civil War veterans of Post 45, Grand Army of the Republic, had worked for many years to raise a monument dedicated to the dead of the Civil War.

When John H. Finley, president of Knox College, learned of the monument dedication, he suggested a second ceremony to dedicate a plaque memorializing the senatorial campaign debate between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas. The debate had taken place thirty-eight years earlier on October 7, 1858.

President Finley, with the help of Clark E. Carr, was able to bring several notable speakers to Galesburg for the ceremonies. They included Robert Lincoln, Chauncey DePew and General John M. Palmer.

The Evening Mail of September 24, 1896, used the title above to head the article about the bronze plaque to be mounted on the wall of Old Main. It quoted the words to be on the plaque:

This Memorial Tablet

is placed here

to recall the joint debate

Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Doughlas

Whose words

These Walls Echoed

October the Seventh, MMCCCLVIII

“Equality among the different states is a

cardinal principle upon which

all our institutions rest.” -Douglas

“He is blowing out the moral lights around us

when he contends that whoever wants slaves

has a right to hold them.” -Lincoln.

Several hundred small bronze reproductions of the plaque were given to those who subscribed to the memorial fund.

Although they never met, John H. Finley and Carl Sandburg did much in their lifetimes to make the public aware of the connection between Knox College and the Lincoln-Douglas Debate. Finley caused the erection of the plaque which helped to inspire Sandburg to write his monumental biography of the Great Emancipator.