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Rockford Watch Company

United States · Founded 1873 · No longer in production

Founded 1873 in Rockford, Illinois (93 miles from Chicago on the Rock River), organized using machinery purchased from the reorganized Cornell Watch Co. Former Cornell employees P. H. Wheeler and C. W. Parker were instrumental in setup; George D. Clarke (ex-United States Watch Co.) served as superintendent. Factory building was constructed 1875-76 on the 300 block of South Madison St. First watch shipped May 1, 1876: an 18-size, key-wind, full-plate movement with expansion balance, from an initial run of 5 grades made by ~40 employees at ~10 watches/day. Grew to ~350 employees producing ~150 watches/day by the late 1880s. Reorganized after financial trouble in 1896 as 'Rockford Watch Co., Ltd.'; acquired in 1901 by J. Franks and M. C. Eppenstein of the Illinois Watch Case Co. Ceased operations in 1915 after producing just under 1,000,000 watches (serial numbers ran from roughly 1,200 in 1876 to about 1,000,000 by 1915, with roughly half of total lifetime output made 1902-1915). Known for high-grade railroad-standard movements, early ones signed 'Ruby' or 'Ruby Jewels', later a stylized letter 'R' with jewel count, and later production marked 'RG'/'RRG' for 'Railroad Grade'. Sources: pocketwatchrepair.com/histories/rockford.html (fetched via reader-proxy due to an expired TLS cert on the origin site), railswest.com/time/rockford.html, and corroborating detail on specific grades from Internet Horology Club 185 (ihc185.infopop.cc) collector forum threads. NAWCC's own wiki (wiki.nawcc.org) and pocketwatchdatabase.com could not be directly fetched this session (the former has a broken/expired SSL certificate at the origin; the latter sits behind a Cloudflare bot-verification challenge that resisted both direct and reader-proxy fetch), so this entry leans on the two sources above plus forum corroboration rather than those two flagship references — flag for a follow-up pass if those sites become reachable.