Elgin ( EL-jin) is a city in Cook and Kane counties in the northern share 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 Place and set the theater 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 traveled west. Looking for a site upon 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 acknowledged a shortened milk factory here in 1866, and the local library was named in his honor. The dairy industry became less important subsequent to the coming on 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 Good watches in the United States (the factory ceased production in 1965 and was torn all along in the summer of 1966) and the operator of the largest watchmaking mysterious in the world. Today, the clocks at Chicago’s Union Station still bear the Elgin name.