Ferozepur was a small holding under a widow of the Cis-Sutlej states when the Company took it in 1835. It sat on the left bank of the Sutlej, which is to say on the Company's side of the boundary but within sight of the Sikh state. A cantonment and one of the largest arsenals in northern India were built there.
The First Anglo-Sikh War opened around it. The Khalsa army crossed the Sutlej in December 1845, and Mudki, Ferozeshah and Sobraon were all fought within a short ride. Ferozeshah, on 21 and 22 December 1845, was the closest the Company came to losing northern India, and the British commander destroyed his own papers that night in anticipation.
The Ferozepur headworks on the Sutlej, built later, feed the Sirhind canal and the Rajasthan feeder. The 1947 boundary was drawn to leave the headworks and the town on the Indian side, which was contested at the time and is still argued over.
Hussainiwala, where the bodies of Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev were burned in 1931, is a few kilometres out of the town at the river.
The Ferozepur field force was the nearest British body of troops to the boundary and it did not move on the opening day of the war, which was afterward one of the standing questions about the campaign. Its commander had been told to hold the arsenal rather than to march, and the arsenal was what everybody on both sides was thinking about.
The town's cantonment, its old cemetery and its colonial civil lines are largely intact and almost entirely undescribed.
The 1947 award gave Ferozepur and its headworks to India after the line had reportedly been drawn otherwise, and the argument about that change has never been settled.
Punjab boundary commission material, 1947.