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Concept
Fairbury, Illinois
Summary
Fairbury is a city in Livingston County, Illinois, United States. The population was 3,757 at the 2010 census.
Fairbury is located on U.S. Route 24 11 miles east of Chenoa and six miles west of Forrest. It was founded in 1857. The town has a large population of members of the Apostolic Christian faith, who first settled in the area in 1864.
Fairbury was laid out on November 10, 1857 by Caleb L. Patton and Octave Chanute. Like most Illinois towns of the 1850s, the original town of Fairbury was centered on a depot ground. It consisted of twenty-six blocks, each divided into fourteen to sixteen lots. There was no central public square, but one was later included in Marsh's addition. The plan used was virtually identical to that at Chatsworth, Illinois, including the street names, and the plan was very similar to that at Gridley and El Paso on the same railroad.
Octave Chanute was a civil engineer employed by the new Peoria and Oquawka Railroad, which is now the Toledo, Peoria and Western Railroad. Caleb L. Patton was an early settler on the land where the town was built. Chanute, a French native, was later famed for publishing Progress in Flying Machines, which helped pioneer aviation (the Wright brothers even mentioned Chanute as a mentor to them). Chanute built the railroad that made Fairbury possible, but did so against the will of Patton, Fairbury's first citizen.
Caleb Patton owned the land that the original town was built on and advertised lots for sale, attracting other people to live there. The original town's area starts at the corner of Maple Street and First Street and stretches to the corner of Oak Street and Seventh Street. When Patton heard that Chanute wanted to build a railroad in the area's general direction, he saw it as an opportunity to make use of his otherwise deserted land and struck a deal. If Chanute built his railroad through Fairbury, then Patton would give Chanute half of the town's property.
Patton and Chanute reached an agreement, and Chanute kept up his end of the deal.
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