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 decided in the Place in 1864.

Fairbury was laid out upon November 10, 1857 by Caleb L. Patton and Octave Chanute. Like most Illinois towns of the 1850s, the native town of Fairbury was centered upon a depot ground. It consisted of twenty-six blocks, each on bad terms into fourteen to sixteen lots. There was no central public square, but one was vanguard included in Marsh’s addition. The strive for used was just about identical to that at Chatsworth Illinois, including the street names, and the purpose very thesame to that at Gridley and El Paso upon the same railroad.

Octave Chanute was a civil engineer employed by the further Peoria and Oquawka Railroad, which is now the Toledo, Peoria and Western Railroad. Caleb L. Patton was an beforehand settler on the house where the town was built. Chanute, a French native, was progressive famed for publishing Progress in Flying Machines, which helped fortune-hunter aviation (the Wright brothers even mentioned Chanute as a mentor to them). Chanute built the railroad that made Fairbury possible, but did so adjoining the will of Patton, Fairbury’s first citizen.