Two blocks north of this corner, President Abraham Lincoln's funeral train 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 for their meat packing plant and chose property 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 lived in neighborhoods on or just off State Street, including Freitag's subdivision, created in 1879 near Lincoln Avenue and State Street. Freitag's subdivision, the residential neighborhoods on Douglas, Ingraham, Forsythe, and Plummer avenues, and 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.