Aurora won its watch factory in a bidding contest between towns. The move was got up by a Chicago jeweller named Wendell, the first directors were jewellers from Aurora, Chicago, Quincy and Kankakee, and what settled it was the inducement: a capital base of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, seventy five thousand of it raised from Aurora's own citizens, and the land. The Aurora Watch Company was incorporated in June 1883, its stock in hundred dollar shares held largely by the retail dealers who would sell the product, each granted the exclusive right to the movements in his own town. The factory on South LaSalle Street was built in 1883 and 1884 to a design by Adler and Sullivan, at a point when Louis Sullivan had just made full partner and much of the firm's work was industrial. The first Aurora watch was finished in October 1884. It lasted eight years. Between 1884 and November 1892 the company built an estimated 108,000 eighteen size movements and 8,000 six size ladies' movements, some of them under other names for jobbers in Chicago, Toronto and Atlanta, and it advertised grades fitted for railway service. Henry Cain and Charles Rood led a syndicate that bought the firm at auction in August 1890, and in January 1893 the machinery was crated and sent to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, to the Hamilton Watch Company those two had helped found the year before. Rood became Hamilton's president in 1894. The Aurora plant passed to the Aurora Corset Company, which added three connected wings around the turn of the century. Listed on the National Register in 1986, the building burned in 1989 and was struck off in 1995. Bluff Street Park is on the ground.
Getting there
41.7453, -88.3233
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