Prior to the Civil War, an estimated 3,000 to 4,500 African descendants traveled to the Chicago region to escape slavery in the South. Black and White abolitionists in Chicago and across the region formed networks of support that became the Underground Railroad, and from the 1830s until the Civil War their work, together with the convergence of waterways, roads, and railroads, made Chicago a pivotal juncture in that system. Black families, some with children, and individuals traveling on their own came up through Illinois, many to Chicago, then the size of the Loop, before continuing by boat over Lake Michigan or overland along the historic Detroit-Chicago Road, now U.S. 12. Those on the road traveled south from Chicago through present-day Riverdale, crossed the Little Calumet River, and continued into northwest Indiana and across southern Michigan, with an estimated 500 to 800 following this path to the U.S.-Canada border. During the Underground Railroad era, the area around this part of the Little Calumet River was mostly farmland, and the Ton and Kuyper farms were paramount as stations because they offered safe havens where the Detroit-Chicago Road crossed the river. The original forty-acre Ton farm included what is now Chicago's Finest Marina and extended to Beaubien Woods near the current Bishop Ford Expressway and 134th St. Built by the federal government in the 1820s as a military and commercial highway, the Detroit-Chicago Road crossed the Little Calumet River at what is now the Indiana Avenue Bridge. Following the 1832 Black Hawk War and the Treaty of Chicago in 1833, events that brought the forced removal of indigenous people from their ancestral homelands, families from New York and New England settled along the Little Calumet River, joined in the late 1840s by Dutch settlers. Some who had escaped enslavement and were traveling on from Chicago found accommodations and aid from farm families along this corridor, including the Tons and the Kuypers. After 1856, at least 100 escaping African descendants traveled on the Illinois Central Railroad from Cairo and southern Illinois, some hidden and others as ticket holders on their way to Chicago, while the Michigan Central and Michigan Southern Railroads, which completed connections into Chicago in 1852, provided additional routes for Black freedom seekers heading toward Detroit.