Hammond: The Refrigerated City

Hammond began as a slaughterhouse on the Indiana-Illinois border, and the man who built it gave the city something that changed American eating forever. In eighteen sixty-nine, Detroit meatpacker George Hammond and his partner Marcus Towle opened the State Line Slaughterhouse here, right beside the railroad tracks. Hammond had a radical idea: pack fresh beef in ice inside specially built railcars and ship it east. It worked, and the refrigerated railcar came into wide use.

Hammond himself stayed in Detroit, so it was Towle who built the actual city, platting streets, selling lots, opening a hotel, a newspaper, even a roller-skating rink. When the town incorporated in eighteen eighty-four, Towle became its first mayor. Today Hammond is one of the westernmost cities in Indiana, pressed against the Chicago city limits, the unlikely birthplace of the American cold chain.