Charles Duryea, a pioneering automaker, was born on December 15, 1861, in Canton, Illinois. Alongside his brother Frank, he designed and constructed some of the earliest gasoline-powered automobiles in the United States. In the 1890s, Charles Duryea built several of these innovative vehicles in Peoria and nearby Peoria Heights. Notably, in 1895, a Duryea car made history by winning the first automobile race in the United States, completing a route from Chicago to Evanston in approximately ten hours.
