In August 1859, Abraham Lincoln, then a little-known Illinois attorney, traveled through Cameron by train on the Hannibal and St. Joseph Railroad and arrived at Second and Walnut without fanfare. In the winter of 1863, John Wilkes Booth, leading a small group of traveling entertainers returning east from Fort Leavenworth, came through after snowbound days in St. Joseph, hired wagons to reach a train in Breckenridge, and stopped overnight at the Cameron depot. Their separate journeys brought both men through the same place before Lincoln became the 16th President of the United States and Booth became his assassin.