Jan 11 1982 - 5:30:24, 3.57 PM

The Elgin National Watch Company and Woodruff and Edwards Foundry were significant local industries in Elgin. The Time Museum, Milwaukee County Museum, and Smithsonian Institution have exhibits featuring Elgin watches. The Grand Canyon National Park, Texas Ranger Museum, and various other locations also display Elgin watches. Woodruff and Edwards manufactured cast iron coffee mills, which were popular in grocers, hotels, and restaurants. These mills came in different sizes and colors. Elgin-made coffee mills can be found in several places, including general stores and historical parks. The age of an Elgin mill can be determined by the manufacturer's name. Wherever Elgin residents travel in this country, they are not far from two products of local industry, watches and coffee mills. Movements turned out by the Elgin National Watch Company can be seen in the exhibits of the Time Museum in Rockford Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan, and the National Association of Watch and Clock Collectors in Columbia, Pennsylvania. The Time Museum also has the works of the clock that once counted the hours in the tower of the main plant of the watch factory. The Milwaukee County Museum has the firm's patent files, and the Smithsonian Institution at Washington, D.C. has examples of Elgin's famed automatic watchmaking machinery. On display at the Visitor's Center at the Grand Canyon National Park is Elgin Watch No. 456, made in 1867. It was carried by Major John Wesley Powell on his exploration trips down the Colorado River in 1869 and 1872. At the Texas Ranger Museum in Waco, Texas, is the Elgin Watch carried by Clyde Barrow when he and Bonnie Parker were gunned down by lawmen on May 23, 1934. Even more ubiquitous are the cast iron coffee mills manufactured by the Woodruff and Edwards Foundry from 1889 to 1917, when a fire destroyed the molds. The Elgin National Mills, for grocers, hotels, and restaurants, came in both countertop and floor models. They were finished in red, blue and gold bronze colors. The largest was 68.5 inches high and had wheels 34 inches in diameter. It weighed 365 pounds. It could hold up to 9 pounds of coffee for grinding. The smallest, for household use, was only about a foot high and weighed 20 pounds. Some of the hoppers were made of polished nickel. The grinding burrs were steel. The turning wheels of these colorful mills were used by Elgin boys on the pushmobile cars they built during the road race era, 1910 to 1915. The local foundry was once a leading manufacturer of coffee mills. This is why they crop up in so many different places, often as period pieces and exhibits of general stores. The writer has seen them at Dodge City, Kansas, Cedarburg, Wisconsin, Shingle Springs and San Francisco, California, Virginia City, Montana, Virginia City, New Mexico, and Pipestone, Minnesota. An Elgin-made coffee mill is also displayed at a restoration of a general store at Appomattox Courthouse National Historic Park, Virginia. The site of Lee's surrender to Grant in 1865. This is a rare anachronism by the National Park Service, usually meticulous in the accuracy of its exhibits. Here in Elgin, a large coffee mill is in the Window Museum of the Elgin Area Historical Society on East Chicago Street. One way of determining the age of an Elgin-made mill is the name of the manufacturer. The C.H. Woodruff Company did not become Woodruff and Edwards until 1900.