How to say Beau Bien Boulevard in Lisle

LISLE, Ill. (WLS) -- Does it drive you crazy when people mispronounce street names? Well, Nadine reached out to make sure ABC7 got the pronunciation correct when reporting on a crash in west suburban Lisle on Beau Bien Boulevard.

Whether it's Beau Bien Boulevard in Lisle or Beaubien Court in Chicago, the pronunciation and the streets honor the same man: Mark Beaubien, one of Chicago's first settlers.

"Chicago's first really big industry was the fur trade. That's what brings Mark Beaubien here in the 1820s," said John Russick, Interpretation and Education VP, Chicago History Museum.

Beaubien brought his family, set down roots and built the first frame house in Chicago, the Sauganash Hotel. That's located off the Chicago River at Wolf Point, near West Wacker Drive and Lake Street in the Loop.

"The Sauganash Hotel becomes this place, this sort of civic-social place that really becomes the foundation of early Chicago," Russic said. "Beaubien would play his fiddle and he kept things light. He kept things entertaining. Of course he was interested in people staying longer. Maybe they would eat, maybe they would drink."

Fast forward to 1841. Beaubien is convinced by his older brother, Jean Baptiste Beaubien, who's already moved to Naperville, to relocate to a little town called Lisle.

Beaubein purchased a building and surrounding farmland on Southwest Plank Road, now Ogden Avenue, and converted it into a tavern.

"He invested in the plank road that was coming out of Chicago that was scheduled to come through Lisle, one thing that Mark had pushed for, and then turned this tavern into a toll house," Beaubien Tavern Museum Curator Concetta Gibson said.

Nearly 100 years after Beaubien's death, the building was moved to Lisle Station Park, along with other historic buildings, as part of a museum center.

"This room that we're standing in now is set up kind of as what the tavern would have looked like," Gibson said.

The museum has some of the original wooden planks from Southwest Plank Road. Eventually that plank road began to deteriorate. It became a gravel road. In 1877, it was renamed Ogden Avenue after Chicago's first mayor, who died that year.