Environmental Progress - Fall 1998

Illinois EPA's New Home Has Deep Foundations in City's Past

From 1869 to 1979 things changed dramatically in Springfield, and yet......

In 1869, Abraham Lincoln's body rested in a temporary receiving tomb in Springfield, Ill., just down the hill from the spot where work was getting underway on his tomb.

The state's capital city had approximately 17,000 residents, and was about to replace its volunteer fire brigade with paid fire fighters.

People got their drinking water from creeks or hand-dug wells, municipal sanitation needs were met by backyard privies and chamber pots, and air pollution control meant the wind was blowing the smoke from chimneys, the smith's forge and the town dump away from the "wash" drying in the prairie breeze.

Civil War veterans were trying to put their interrupted lives back on track; businesses were trying to shift back into peace time mode.

In 1869, Lincoln's law partner John T. Stuart and a group of investors formed the Springfield Watch Co., with Stuart as president. Work on the new firm's first building began in 1870. The three story brick structure rising from a 14-acre pasture just beyond Springfield's northern boundary was completed the following year, and the first watch was produced in 1872.

The young company was still settling into successful production, with 125 employees turning out 25 watch movements a day, when the Panic of 1873 drained the market, leaving the firm with a big inventory of inexpensive timepieces but few buyers. After some reorganization, the business resumed, this time as the Illinois Watch Co.

A gold case and jeweled movement for under $25

Illinois Watch Co. had a reputation for making affordable timepieces. Accuracy was not a real high priority.

Just before World War I ended, you could buy an Illinois watch for a dime down and escalating weekly payments in ten cent increments. The watch was delivered on receipt of the first dime.

Approaches to watch-making changed when the nation's railroads began demanding watches you could bet your life on.

Prior to modern signaling technology, railroads relied on careful timing when dispatching trains on the same set of tracks, not unlike the way today's computers sequence the exchange of data through a single phone line or network connection.

If the timing went awry, trainmen could find themselves up to their cowcatchers in other cowcatchers, and in 1891 the railroads set the nation's first time-keeping standards, requiring every trainman's watch to be proven accurate to within 30 seconds a week. (A hundred years later, Hewlett-Packard Co. introduced an atomic clock capable of slicing a second into a trillion slivers; for this clock to lose 30 seconds will require 48 million years.)

Working for the Illinois Watch Co. was more than just a job. The company hosted dinners for supervisors and provided picnics for employees in local parks.

Picnics in the Park, and a Big Brass Band

Old photos show men in coats and ties and women in ankle-length skirts reclining around picnic hampers on blankets spread under shady trees. More than one such gathering was at Reservoir Park just across what is now Eleventh St., where a reservoir stored the city's water supply.

In 1881 the company brought Prof. Louis Lehmann from New York to Springfield to head up the Watch Company Band. With an eye-catching clock face painted on the bass drum, the group in its blue uniforms with little watch emblems on their caps performed and competed all over the state, and marched in the Armistice Day parade in 1918. Prof. Lehmann died during a band rehearsal in 1923; the band subsequently became the Springfield Municipal Band.

Around 1913 a company worker wrote the workers were ..."one large happy family, rather than the very common one of soul-less corporation and unfortunate employees."

800 Watches a Day, and Growing

The Illinois Watch Co. and its trainmen's watches -- the Sangamo and Bunn Specials, the Bunn and the A.Lincoln were prized models -- continued riding the rails to prosperity. During its peak years from 1900 to 1928, the company turned out as many as 800 watches, famed for their quality and accuracy, every day. In 1911, Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen selected Bunn Specials as the official watches for his successful effort to reach the South Pole.

The growing company added buildings in 1909, 1912, 1913, and 1919.

The structure built in 1913 was a fully equipped observatory containing an 8.5 inch refracting telescope, used to verify with stellar precision the accuracy of company products. The company made the telescope available to local schools and interested Springfield citizens.

The observatory was dismantled in 1937, and most of the equipment sold to Bradley Polytechnic Institute, now Bradley University, in Peoria. Other parts went to the Boy Scouts' Camp Illiniwek at Lake Springfield.

Women With Their Hands on Time

Women made up a large portion of the workforce, being particularly adept at setting the jewels in the watch movements. By 1910, women accounted for 42 percent of the firm's 900 workers. The company even provided a "club room" for them, complete with lunch making facilities, club banners on the walls, a piano, and a full time "matron" to oversee the operation.

Total employment at Illinois Watch Co. eventually peaked at 1,200. In 1928, the firm was bought by the Hamilton Watch Co., but once again national economics played a role in its destiny. By this time, "Depression" rather than "Panic" had become the term of choice, but the results were the same. Watch-making ceased for good at the site in 1932.

Over its lifetime, Illinois Watch Co. produced nearly six million jeweled movements, many of them assembled under the glow of gas lights. It was 1900 before electricity lit the company's shops and powered its machines.

Electricity also sparked a spinoff operation that would survive the parent firm by half a century.

$10,000 Starts a Meter Business

In 1899, Sangamo Electric Co. had been organized as the meter department of the Illinois Watch Co., following a $10,000 investment in an immigrant's handmade device for measuring electrical flow. Sangamo Electric soon began designing its own meters and other products and eventually became an important global manufacturer of precision mechanical, electrical and electronic equipment for industrial and military customers.

In 1937, Sangamo bought the old watch company buildings from Hamilton. By the late 1950s, all had been demolished except for the 1918 structure known as the Clock Tower that remained a Springfield landmark.

Sangamo's success translated into a building spree that nearly filled the four-square-block area where sheep had once kept the lawns trimmed. During World War II, the facility operated non-stop, repeatedly winning U.S. government "E" awards for its achievements in producing top secret detection devices for sub-marines. In 1943, the work force peaked at 3,080.

Sangamo's independence ended when it was bought in 1975 by Schlumberger Ltd., an oil-industry supplier that kept the facilities in operation until 1978.

Sometime after 1978, the clock in the tower quit telling time. The roofs on the buildings that remained sprung multiple leaks, the paint darkened, windows were broken and debris collected in corners. Where for more than a century Springfield men and women had thronged through the gates to jobs, the city now had an abandoned eyesore. The term "brownfields" hadn't yet been coined.

In 1979, Springfield's population was 99,000 and expanding; the Illinois EPA was nine years old and growing.

In 1979, Springfield's population was approximately 99,000. Abraham Lincoln's crypt had been sealed to thwart body-snatching and vigilance against repeated vandalism was increasingly a concern. The man-made lake that supplies the city's drinking water and the wastewater treatment plant that handles its municipal sewage were already decades old. Laundry was more likely to be dried in a machine in the utility room than on a line in the backyard.

The Illinois Environmental Protection Agency was nine years old and outgrowing its Churchill Road headquarters. New buildings were added but some people were beginning to wonder if eventually it would need to find a new place to put down its own roots.