Illinois Watch Co - Engraved Art Deco Case - Prohibition Era - 1929

In the last years of Prohibition, the best rooms in America were not marked from the street. They were behind a side door, up a narrow stair, past a man who looked at your shoes before he looked at your face. Inside, the light was low, the tables were close, and small bright things mattered: a lighter, a ring, a cigarette case, a watch slipping out from under a cuff just long enough to catch the room.

The Illinois here was made in 1929, in the middle of that world, and its case was engraved for that light, chased by hand to flash at the cuff rather than shout across a room. The Illinois Watch Company was one of the finest watchmakers America ever produced, and in the late 1920s it reached its height, designing its own wristwatch cases and casing and boxing everything in Springfield. The watches of those few years are the ones collectors mean when they speak of the golden era of Illinois. No other watchmaker began as this one had: founded in Lincoln's own Springfield, five years after the town buried him, by his closest friends, his first law partner John Todd Stuart as president and the Bunn brothers, his political financiers, whose name still marks the company's greatest railroad watch, the Bunn Special.

The surviving factory records place this movement, serial 5199542, in a single run of one thousand made in Springfield in 1929, the last full year of the golden era. Hamilton had bought the company the year before for more than five million dollars, and by 1932 the Depression had closed the Springfield factory for good. The supply of these watches was fixed the day the doors shut, and that is why collectors hunt them.

The dial will not hold one color. Face on, it reads as brushed silver-grey; tip it into the light and the whole face floods warm, an old gold that lives down in the finish and rises when the angle is right. Oversized black numerals in the heavy lettering of the twenties ring a printed Greek-key frame, and the seconds keep to their own small register set at the left, the layout this model is known by. The numerals hold their original radium, aged dark, and the hands were relumed at some point in the watch's life, their paint younger than the dial's.

Under the back, the grade 903 winds by hand, fifteen jewels set in nickel plates, and Illinois finished those plates the way it finished everything from Springfield: wave-grained damascening flows across every bridge, and the pattern catches the light the moment the back comes off. Illinois Watch Co and the city's name are cut across the plate.

The case is signed by the Star Watch Case Company, stamped Stellar inside the back, an eight-sided shape with cut corners engraved nearly everywhere a graver could reach: a leaf-and-blossom border chased around the bezel, scrollwork running down the band on both sides of the crown. The back shows wear and scratches from use, and the crystal has yellowed at its edges, with haze and light scratches of its own. Inside the back, watchmakers have been signing their work for close to a century, initials and dates scratched one over another, every mark a service that kept it running. It comes on a new brown leather strap. The watch runs. Beyond those scratched dates, its service history is unknown.

Terms: Please review all photos carefully as they are a part of the listing. This is a vintage timepiece. Accuracy, power reserve, and water resistance are not guaranteed. Vintage watches may require periodic service. Performance can vary with wear, temperature, and position.

All sales final.