Hammond: Ice, Beef, and the Refrigerated Rail Car

In eighteen sixty-nine, a Detroit butcher named George Hammond opened a slaughterhouse and meatpacking plant at the edge of Indiana. Hammond's insight was blunt but revolutionary: pack freshly slaughtered beef in ice cut from nearby rivers and lakes, load it into wooden rail cars, and ship it to eastern markets before it spoiled. It worked. The town that grew around the plant took his name.

For three decades Hammond was the meatpacking capital of the region. Then the meatpacking era faded and the city pivoted. Under Mayor Armanis Knotts, who led the city in the early nineteen hundreds, Hammond courted new factories, and the Standard Steel Car Company eventually employed thousands of people at a new plant on the city's edge. Steel, rail, and manufacturing replaced beef as Hammond's livelihood, a pattern repeated across the Indiana lakeshore throughout the twentieth century.