December 1, 1853, and on March 11, 1857 N. B. Curtiss was signing papers as president.

Gilman and Leary were New York men, where most of that days railroad financing originated; Secor was from Toledo, Ohio, and no doubt got that city's name into the final title, although the road was chartered only in Illinois; Bestor was from St. Louis, and apparently knew Count Chlopicki there, where the latter ran a tavern (at that date an inn) at 30 Pine Street. Bestor was chagrined when his colleagues Secor, Cruger and Gilman had towns named for them and he had none.

10. Octave Chanute was born in Paris, France, February 18, 1832, and died November 23, 1910, being buried in Peoria's Springdale Cemetery. He is better known for his book, Progress in Flying Machines which he wrote in 1894, and for the valued technical advice he gave the Wrights prior to their Kitty Hawk flights than he is for his railroad building. His biggest memorials are Chanute Field at Rantoul, Illinois, and the city of Chanute, Kansas.

He came to America in 1838 and lived as a boy in Louisiana, moving to New York City in 1844 where he completed his education. He went to work helping the engineers of the New York and Albany Railroad when he was only seventeen. He came to Illinois in 1853 and helped build the Joliet-Bloomington line of the present day G. M. & 0. Railroad, and from 1854 into 1861 he was the chief engineer of the eastern extension construction of the Peoria and Oquawka. He had been credited with much of the planning of the city of Fairbury in his spare time. He went with Ohio and Mississippi Railroad in 1862, reconstructing the line from St. Louis to Vincennes, and in 1863 became chief engineer of the Chicago and Alton, in charge of its maintenance and new construction.

He entered a competition for designing the Chicago Union Stockyards and won. Next he engineered the yards at Kansas City, Missouri, and then designed and constructed three bridges across the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers. He then served ten years as chief engineer of the Erie Railroad. He later became the most important consulting engineer in Kansas City, Missouri.

11. From the testimony of James H. Wathen in the railroad suit and from the William Ostler diary describing the building. Bestor speaks of the Count living in his house, and of its use as a public place, in which he put a map.

12. This is Bestor's own testimony in the railroad case. He was a prominent Whig and Republican, a real estate man and a friend of Lincoln. He was of the group which secured Lincoln to speak in Peoria on October 16, 1854. Lincoln appointed Bestor postmaster of Peoria on May 27, 1861.

Bestor’s Colleague Peter Sweat was just as prominent in the Democratic Party and was serving as postmaster while the railroad was being built toward El Paso. It was Sweat who presided at the meeting in Peoria when John Calhoun, later a mayor of Springfield, spoke to the Democrats there on April 13, 1844. Lincoln was in court at Metamora, and as court adjourned on Saturday, he rode over to Peoria and listened to his friend Calhoun speak. Somehow, Lincoln's friends got him to make a thirty minute reply to Calhoun as the hour grew late. He is reported to have said that his fellow townsman John Calhoun "was a stronger political speaker than Judge Douglas."

13. The story of the naming of the town is from the story repeated by Bernhard Sturm and other early settlers who had heard Wathen and Gibson tell