What is the Q? The British answer would be people standing in line. Biblical scholars’ answer is that it would be “the lost gospel.” A New Yorker’s answer would be that it is the 2nd Ave./Broadway Express subway train to Coney Island. A pool player would call it the white ball. For our purposes in Chicagoland, it is what we presently know as the BNSF Railway or the Metra BNSF train line between Chicago and Aurora.
It got its name as a contraction of the name CB&Q, namely the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad that ran through Chicago’s Western Suburbs beginning in 1864. Generations of local residents referred to “taking the Q” to downtown Chicago to get to work, or perhaps to shop at Marshall Field’s department store, or to go to the theater. The CB&Q moniker lasted until 1970, when the company merged with three other railroads to become the Burlington Northern (BN). BN itself subsequently consolidated with famed (at least in the Judy Garland song) Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway to form the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway (BNSF), the name by which we know it today.
The CB&Q got its start in 1849 as the Aurora Branch Rail Road, a little branch line off the newly opened (1848) Galena & Chicago Union Rail Road, providing the city of Aurora with a rail connection to Chicago. Both companies expanded to the point where they outgrew each other. Landlord G&CU cancelled tenant CB&Q’s running rights into Chicago, prompting the need for CB&Q to build its own route between Aurora and Chicago. That route opened in 1864, smack in the middle of the Civil War.
So that was the Q – what about the towns? It was still pretty much frontier territory in 1864. The first meaningful white settlement had begun about 1830, first as frontier settlements, then as self-sufficient communities. By 1864, there were only four population clusters along the old Southwestern Trail (as Ogden Avenue was then known).
All four were established at about the same time. Lyons began in 1827 with the opening of David and Bernardus Laughton’s tavern along the Des Plaines River. Brush Hill (present day Ogden Avenue and York Road) got its start with the Torode saw mill (later the Graue grist mill) in 1836. In 1832-1833, Pierce Downer and Joseph Naper each founded homesteads and mercantile centers in present day DuPage County.
Those four towns anticipated that the new CB&Q railroad line would pass directly through their communities. The desire of the new railroad to have a route as straight and flat as possible meant that three of the towns got bypassed: a half mile or so north of both Lyons and Naperville, and about a mile south of Brush Hill. Only Downer’s Grove found itself directly in the path of the railroad. Following the end of the Civil War, real estate developers recognized the value of subdividing land along the railroad and began establishing more towns along the Q.
