On May 18, 1875 the Pantagraph ran a long article describing the madstone owned by a Mr. J P Evans of Lincoln. The Pantagraph described this mad stone as having great notoriety throughout the state as well as in many "other States of the Union." The stone was a small one, but described by men who had seen as it as either the size of a goose or hen's egg or the size of a grindstone. The reporter compared it to a piece of wood one and half inches long and a half inch thick. It was irregular in shape and porous in appearance, with holes that continued completely through the stone. The inner part of the stone was grayish or flinty in appearance. Although this reporter did not know the origin of madstones, they were usually stony accretions from the stomach of a deer. It was thought that the madstone from an albino deer was superior to one from a brown deer.
The Evans' stone had been in the possession of the Evans family for fully four generations, the stone being brought to Illinois by Mr. Evans' grandfather and carried by him during the Blackhawk War, when it happened to be broken.
The stone was preserved by the Evans family as a "relic of antiquity" and the reporter stated:
"Of its powers there can be no question. Hundreds of people have undoubtedly been saved from the terrors of hydrophobia by its application to their wounds, and although a few have gone so far as to say that its properties are a mere chimera, and that the beneficial results are not owing to the genuine powers of the stone but are produced by the effects of imagination upon the subject's mind, there can be no question that it has the genuine powers for which it has so notorious a reputation."
Although Mr. Evans had kept no account of the people saved by the stone, he estimated that around a thousand people had used it with good results in the twenty years he owned the stone. Not one person who had resorted to this stone failed to have relief, even persons who had already succumbed to hydrophobic fits. People from Wisconsin, Iowa and Indiana had come to Mr. Evans to use the stone. He had been called from his home many times to deliver the stone to a victim of a mad dog. Mr. Evans always made a charge in proportion to the family's ability to pay, but he had never kept an account of his profit from the stone. The stone was not used for hydrophobia alone. Mr. Evans had applied the stone to victims of rattlesnake and spider bites, and bee stings as well as scrofula and erysipelas.
Mr. Evans always made the application of the stone personally. The stone would take about one hour to fill with poison, but then was emptied of poison in fifteen minutes by placing it in a glass of water. Usually the stone would be used for twenty four hours, but on one occasion, application was necessary for an entire week. The stone would stop adhering to the wound when it was filled with poison, and when drained of poison, the water would become green and odorous.
Mr. Evans could not explain why the stone worked, but made an analogy to the lodestone, which has magnetic powers. There were other madstones in the vicinity, but none of them worked to cure disease like Mr. Evans' did. One recorded use of the stone was for Mr. J S Tucker in Fairbury on July 7, 1879. In January of 1874, two men from Batavia, Illinois came to Lincoln to use Mr. Evan's madstone. Jacob Howser of Lincoln (1880) and Susan Prother of Shirley (1875) also claimed to have madstones that had been used to treat hydrophobia cases. A Rev. Beedles in Potomac, Illinois had a madstone that was used in 1886 to cure a man from Jacksonville. His hogs were bitten by a mad dog, became mad and died of hydrophobia before he was convinced that his bite should be treated.