Elgin History Museum, Illinois, United States

5Taylor B 5:00 PM Jun 9, 2022

Elgin is more than Elgin watches
As a retired newspaperman, my knowledge of the history of Elgin, Illinois, was limited to the Elgin Watch Company that was a major U.S. watch maker from 1864 to 1968 and coach Bill Chesbrough, whose high school basketball teams won 573 games from 1950 to 1985. But I furthered my education of the Chicago suburb while visiting the Elgin History Museum. Located at 360 Park Street, at College Street, in the Elgin Historic District, it is open from 11 to 4 Wednesday through Saturday. Housed in an 1856 landmark building designed in the Greek Revival style and known as Old Main that was once part of the Elgin Academy campus, the museum was opened in 1981 with the mission to tell the history of the community, about the city's beginnings, the road race, Hiawatha Pageant, the Elgin Watch Company, other Elgin businesses from steel kitchens to outboard motors toastmasters to dairy products to street sweepers to coffee to bandsaws, and the 1846 Nancy Kimball Cobblestone House, the oldest cobblestone building in Elgin. The museum has seven permanent exhibits--Elgin: From River To Rails, which traces the early history of the town from its founding in 1835 through the 1890s; Explore Elgin Architecture, which illustrates the many building and design styles still evident throughout the city and identifies prominent Elgin architects; Made in Elgin, which highlights the many products that have been manufactured in Elgin; Elgin Road Races, highlights the brief but colorful history of the Elgin Road Race, first held in 1910; Hiawatha Pageant, which celebrates the long-running pageant featuring Native American costumes; The Elgin Watch Company, which features a wall mural of the clock face that once graced the watch factory tower, original watchmaking tools and many examples of Elgin watches, including the 13th watch produced on the company's famed assembly line; and Elgin 20th Century, which presents Elgin through the 1970s, allowing visitors to learn about Elgin going dry before Prohibition, the devastation of the Palm Sunday tornado and how Elgin residents persevered during the Depression and World War II to create an All-American City in 1952 and the seventh largest city in Illinois. But that's not all. Upcoming exhibits include Bluff City Cemetery Walk on September 24-25; the annual Classic Car Show that has been a popular attraction since 2012; Dairies to Prairies, which tells the story of Elgin's dairy heritage; and the Nancy Kimball Cobblestone House, located at 302 West Chicago Avenue, which was built for the widow of one of Elgin's founders, Joseph Kimball. The 1,500-square-foot building is unique and significant to Elgin as one of the last old architectural styles of its kind, with 16-inch thick cobblestone walls. Yes, Elgin has a lot of history and the Elgin History Museum covers all of it.

4KatieVirginia 5:00 PM Oct 1, 2018

Nice local history museum
This museum had a good collection of local history items and interesting information. While I don't have any real tie to Elgin (was there for business), I still found it very interesting because the story of Elgin has much in common with the settling of the rest of the midwest. The rooms were arranged logically and had a good mix of visual and written. Definitely worth a visit.