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Elgin is a city on the Fox River in Kane County, Illinois, with a small portion in Cook County, about 40 miles northwest of Chicago.

Brothers James and Hezekiah Gifford founded Elgin in April 1835, and James recorded the original town plat in 1842.

The city took its name from a Scottish hymn tune called 'Elgin.'

Elgin counted 114,797 residents in the 2020 census, spread across about 39,300 households averaging nearly three people each.

Elgin first won fame for dairy: Gail Borden opened a condensed milk factory here in 1866, and the city's public library still carries his name.

The National Watch Company was incorporated on August 18, 1864, and shipped its first watch, named for company president Benjamin Wright Raymond, on April 1, 1867.

Renamed the Elgin National Watch Company in 1874, the firm became America's largest watch producer; by 1907 it sold more than 600,000 watches a year, nearly a third of the market, and employed about 3,200 people.

The Elgin watch factory was the largest watchmaking site in the world, complete with its own observatory, built in 1910, that timed watches to a tenth of a second using the stars.

Elgin watch production ended in the late 1950s and the factory was demolished in the 1960s, but the observatory survives as a school-district planetarium and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Elgin's Victorian-era core is preserved in the Elgin Historic District, 697 buildings across 206 acres, listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1983.