Elgin Illinois History & Facts

Elgin is a city in Cook and Kane counties in the northern part of the U.S. state of Illinois. Elgin is located 35 mi (56 km) northwest of Chicago, along the Fox River. As of the 2020 Census, the city had a population of 114,797, the seventh-largest city in Illinois.

The Indian Removal Act of 1830 and the Black Hawk Indian War of 1832 led to the expulsion of the Native Americans who had settlements and burial mounds in the area and set the stage for the founding of Elgin. Thousands of militiamen and soldiers of Gen. Winfield Scott's army marched through the Fox River valley during the war, and accounts of the area's fertile soils and flowing springs soon filtered east.

In New York, James T. Gifford and his brother Hezekiah Gifford heard tales of this area ripe for settlement, and they travelled west. Looking for a site on the stagecoach route from Chicago to Galena, Illinois, they eventually settled on a spot where the Fox River could be bridged. In April 1835, they established the city, naming it after the Scottish tune "Elgin".

Early Elgin achieved fame for the butter and dairy goods it sold to the city of Chicago. Gail Borden established a condensed milk factory here in 1866, and the local library was named in his honor. The dairy industry became less important with the arrival of the Elgin Watch Company. The watch factory employed three generations of Elginites from the late 19th century to the mid 20th century, when it was the largest producer of fine watches in the United States (the factory ceased production in 1965 and was torn down in the summer of 1966) and the operator of the largest watchmaking complex in the world. Today, the clocks at Chicago's Union Station still bear the Elgin name.

Elgin has a long tradition of education and invention. Elgin is home to the Elgin Academy, the oldest coeducational, non-sectarian college preparatory school west of the Allegheny Mountains. Elgin High School boasts five Navy admirals, a Nobel Prize winner, a Pulitzer Prize winner, a Tony Award winner, two Academy Award-winning producers, Olympic athletes and a General Motors CEO among its alumni. Elgin resident John Murphy invented the motorized streetsweeper in 1914 and later formed the Elgin Sweeper Corporation. Pioneering African-American chemist Lloyd Hall was an Elgin native, as was the legendary marketer and car stereo pioneer Earl "Madman" Muntz and Max Adler, founder of the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, America's first planetarium.

Local historian E. C. Alft wrote several books and a long-running newspaper column about Elgin's history.

Famous Peoples From Elgin Illinois

James Henry Breasted

Elmer Charles "Mike" Alft Jr. (July 13, 1925 - November 22, 2021) was an American historian and former mayor of Elgin, Illinois. Born in Chicago, Illinois, he graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Grinnell College in 1949 and received his master's degree from Syracuse University in 1950. He taught at Elgin High School for four decades while serving as city councilman, mayor, secretary of the Board of Trustees of the Gail Borden Public Library District, and various other capacities in local government. In addition he was a part-time instructor at Elgin Community College.

Alft was elected to the Elgin City Council in the at-large election in April, 1963. Four years later, he was elected Mayor, succeeding Clyde Shales. As was the custom at the time, Alft did not seek reelection when his four-year term expired in 1971. William Rauschenberger was elected to succeed him.

He may be best known as a historian of Elgin. He has published several books on the history of Elgin and the surrounding area, in addition to hundreds of articles for the local newspaper, the Elgin Daily Courier-News. He also wrote a biweekly column on Elgin's history.

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