Origins of Calumet City and Abraham Lincoln Funeral Train

Origins of Calumet City and Abraham Lincoln Funeral Train. . Two blocks north of this corner the funeral train of President Abraham Lincoln entered Illinois at approximately 10:15 a.m. on May 1, 1865, on the Michigan Central Railroad right-of-way., In the autumn of 1869, the founders of the State Line Slaughter House walked east along the railroad tracks searching for a suitable site on which to establish their meat packing plant. The property they chose was north of the tracks on the east side of the Illinois-Indiana border. The company shipped its first load of dressed, refrigerated beef out of Hammond in October., Within a few years, some of the land south of the tracks on the Illinois side, once owned by Stephen A. Douglas, an attorney for the Michigan Central and a political colleague of Lincoln, became home to many employees of the packing plant. By 1891, the plant was known as G.H. Hammond and Company and employed approximately 1,000 men and women. Many of them lived in the neighborhoods on or just off State Street, including Freitag's subdivision, which had been created in 1879 in the vicinity of Lincoln Avenue and State Street. Freitag's subdivision and the residential neighborhoods on Douglas, Ingraham, Forsythe, and Plummer avenues, as well as the commercial establishments along State Street, were incorporated as the village of West Hammond, Illinois, in 1893 and became known as Calumet City in 1924.