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.
