Academic literature on the topic 'Burlington and Quincy Railroad Company Chicago'

From his childhood home atop Prospect Hill in Burlington, Iowa, Aldo Leopold could gaze out over the mighty Mississippi and its wet, wooded bottomlands. Each fall and spring, the skies were speckled like the breast of a wood thrush as thousands of migrating birds flew overhead, rousing hunters to their blinds. Coal smoke wafted up from the river’s steamboats. The train whistles of the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad pierced the winds as locomotives chugged back and forth across the Burlington Bridge, linking Illinois to Iowa. Though unaware of it, Leopold was overlooking the meeting of the nation’s East and West, of the Industrial Revolution and the frontier, of an age of nature’s plenty and one of scarcity, of the 19th century and the 20th to come. Leopold was born in Burlington on January 11, 1887, in the house of his grandparents, Charles and Marie Runge Starker. Their home provided fertile soil for the growth of a citizen concerned about people, the land, and the relationships between them. As some flowers are colored by minerals absorbed in their roots, Aldo’s later works exhibit shades of his grandparents and parents. A German immigrant educated in engineering and architecture, Charles Starker had come to Burlington in 1850, when it was a rough river town on the edge of the western prairie. He liked what he saw, because it reminded him of his homeland, and he worked to make Burlington even more into the kind of town he wanted it to be: aesthetic, prosperous, and cultured. Over the years, he progressed from the drafting of buildings to the construction of businesses, excelling as a grocer, banker, alderman, and director of the city cemetery. Using his prestige, he spearheaded efforts to bring to the town, among other civic gems, a library and an opera house, which lent Burlington a grand style scarcely matched by other midwestern communities its size. But style was not enough. Charles was an amateur naturalist, and he believed that cities, as well as homes, required spaces specifically set aside for people to enjoy nature’s offerings.