A century ago, the Illinois Watch Company employed more than 1,300 people at its factory in the Illinois state capital of Springfield, daily turning out hundreds of high-quality mechanical timepieces, mostly pocket watches, as well as some movements for wristwatches. It even had its own astronomical observatory to measure time.
Today, the company with that name operates on a far smaller scale, mostly doing watch repairs and resales, but lately designing new watches, too.
Craig Stone, a watchmaker who acquired the Illinois Watch trademarks in 2009, employs three other watchmakers and an assistant, all of whom work out of a converted 19th-century carriage house in the small city of Quincy on the Mississippi River, along Illinois’s western border. A print of the old Springfield factory (which closed in 1932) hangs on one wall of Mr. Stone’s small watch showroom, where a customer could spend anywhere from about $80 for a Caravelle to $50,000 for a Frederique Constant.
Behind the showroom, the watchmakers work at their benches, overhauling more than 1,000 watches a year — more than half of which, Mr. Stone said, are vintage Illinois. Given the dwindling number of working watchmakers, both globally and in the United States, watches have been arriving from farther and farther afield, he said.
“I guarantee you that we’ve gotten watches in here from all 50 states and at least a dozen foreign countries,” he said.
Mr. Stone, 57, was an accountant and auditor about 30 years ago when he became interested in clocks and watches, and his research indicated the industry might make a good new career. He left his job in Indiana and returned to his hometown, Quincy, to study horology at the local Gem City College. After working for several years under a master watchmaker in Denver, and then for a jewelry store in Quincy, he ventured out on his own in 2005, starting to do repairs and sales.
The Illinois Watch name, he said, appealed to him ever since Gem City, where he worked on a watch made by the company. It turned out that Hamilton, the Pennsylvania watch company that bought Illinois Watch in 1928, still held the trademarks, but had not used them for decades and intended to relinquish them. (Hamilton was bought in 1974 by what is now Swatch Group and moved to Switzerland in 2003.)
As soon as they became available, Mr. Stone applied to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and eventually got the rights.
Since then, Illinois Watch has issued five to 15 new models a year — quartz or automatic mechanical timepieces, with Swiss movements — assembled by a private label company. And in 2020, Mr. Stone debuted his first design assembled in-house: a model called the Stone ($1,950), a limited edition of 200 pieces. Mr. Stone said recently that all but 32 had been sold.
The Stone is a 44-millimeter stainless steel watch with a Swiss ETA-made manual-wind movement. The engraving, final assembly and testing were done on the premises in Quincy.
Mr. Stone said he took a few design cues from the original company; for example, he placed the sub-seconds (the small dial marking the seconds) at 9 o’clock on the dial, a feature sometimes seen in vintage Illinois models. But he wanted this to be a modern watch that was his own, not a copy.
The original Illinois Watch was established at a time when American watch companies such as Waltham and Elgin had the most advanced watchmaking capabilities in the world, according to Fredric J. Friedberg, a retired corporate lawyer who collects vintage Illinois wristwatches and has written extensively about the company.
“The watch industry in the United States was doing assembly line production decades before Henry Ford ever put a car together,” he said in a phone interview from his home in Irvine, Calif.
Illinois Watch, initially known as the Springfield Watch Company, began operations in 1870, five years after President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. But it had connections to Lincoln as the company’s first president, John Todd Stuart, had been Lincoln’s law partner and was a cousin of Mary Todd, Lincoln’s wife. John W. Bunn, who had been a close friend of Lincoln, also was involved in it.
The company would go on to produce a railroad pocket watch called the A. Lincoln and a ladies’ wristwatch called the Mary Todd, said Mr. Friedberg, 79.
The author’s first book about Illinois watches came out in 2004, followed in 2018 by “The Illinois Watch and Its Hamilton Years: The Finale of a Great American Watch Company,” a five-volume set totaling more than 1,600 pages.
“I want the company to live on after I’m gone, and into perpetuity,” Mr. Friedberg said, adding that he was particularly drawn to the Art Deco style of many of its wristwatches. At one point, he said, he had more than 700 Illinois watches in his collection.
Asked about the current iteration of Illinois Watch, Mr. Friedberg said he would have preferred that the modern watches look more like the originals, although he wished Mr. Stone and his business well. “I’m a purist,” he said. “I want the watch exactly as it was released from the factory.”
As for Mr. Stone, plans for this year include assembling a special edition for a private group in St. Louis: men’s and women’s versions of an 18-karat gold automatic watch, priced at more than $26,000 each. This one will also have a Swiss movement manufactured by ETA, but the case and hands are to be made in the United States. And, Mr. Stone said, he is in the initial stage of designing the next in-house Illinois Watch model.
“We’re not the original company,” Mr. Stone said, “but we would like to produce something that lives up to the original name, because they did make really nice watches, and I don’t think anybody can dispute that.”
Janelle Conaway
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