Madison: History

Madison: History

Land Speculator Prevails in State Capital Bid

The Winnebago tribe were the first inhabitants of the area where the city of Madison now stands; these Native Americans lived off the land's bounty and camped alongside Lake Monona and Lake Mendota. Madison owes its founding to James Doty, a native New Yorker who served as circuit judge of the Western Michigan Territory, which included Wisconsin and points as far west as the Dakotas and Iowa.

Doty became a land agent for fur trader and financier John Jacob Astor and in August 1835, he started buying land around the site that was to become Madison; soon he owned more than 1,200 acres on the Four Lakes isthmus.

When the Wisconsin Territorial legislature convened for the first time in October 1836, with the task of selecting the site for the capital, land speculators flocked to the village with "paper" towns for the legislators to consider. In all, 18 townsites were considered, but Doty's vision proved to be the most persuasive. Doty had selected the name Madison in honor of James Madison, the former United States President, for the state capital. The recently deceased Madison had been the last surviving signer of the U.S. Constitution. Doty's design of Madison, with a square in the middle housing the Capitol and streets radiating diagonally from it like spokes in a wheel, was the same as Pierre Charles L'Enfant's street plat of Washington, D.C. The widest street was to be named Washington, and the other streets named after the other signers of the Constitution. When the legislators complained of being cold during their meetings, Doty dispatched a man to Dubuque, Iowa, to purchase Buffalo robes to warm the freezing public officials.

Eben and Rosaline Peck and their son Victor were the first non-Native American family to settle in Madison, arriving in the spring of 1837. They built a crude log inn and named it Madison House, which became the center of early activity and boarded the workmen who had arrived to begin work on the new capitol. Augustus A. Bird supervised a crew of workmen who first built a steam-driven sawmill and then proceeded to try to complete the capitol building before the first legislative session. In November 1838, the legislators arrived to find the statehouse incomplete; when they finally moved into the new statehouse, the conditions were terrible: inkwells were frozen, ice coated the interiors, and hogs squealed in the basement. Legislators threatened to move the capital to Milwaukee but better accommodations could not be guaranteed. The statehouse was not completed until 1848.

Growth and Development Preserve Natural Setting

Improvements were slow to come to Madison and the living conditions remained crude until the arrival of Leonard J. Farwell in 1849. Farwell, a successful Milwaukee businessman, began developing the land by channeling a canal between Lakes Mendota and Monona, damming one end of Lake Mendota, building a grist and flour mill, and opening streets and laying sidewalks. But even as late as 1850, when Madison's population numbered more than 1,600 people, the isthmus thickets were still dense and impenetrable.

The University of Wisconsin was founded in 1848, the year Wisconsin was admitted to the Union. The first graduating class, in 1854, numbered two men. That year the first railroad service arrived in Madison and during the decade before the Civil War, Madison's business economy began to grow. The Madison Institute sponsored a successful literary lyceum and boasted 1,300 volumes in its library. Streets were gas-illuminated by 1855, when three daily and five weekly newspapers were published in the new capital and the population had increased to more than 6,800 people. The city was incorporated in 1856. The following year Madison's citizens voted to donate $50,000 in city bonds to enable the legislature to enlarge and improve the Capitol building.

The Madison Park and Pleasure Drive Association was organized in 1894 and citizens donated lakeshore and forest-bluff tracts as well as money to create scenic drives, parks, and playgrounds in the city. Four years later, the city council started annual contributions to the park association. By 1916, the park association had spent more than $300,000 on improvements to the shoreline and parks. In February 1904, a fire destroyed much of the Capitol's interior. A new Capitol was constructed in stages between 1906 and 1917 on the site of the old one, featuring the only granite state Capitol dome in the United States. As both a state capital and home to a major state university, Madison has experienced a stable economic and educational base.

In rankings of U.S. cities, Madison consistently scores very high on seemingly every form of criteria. In recent years Madison has appeared several times on Money magazine's list of the best places to live. It has been cited by Zero Population Growth as the " #1 healthiest city in the nation to raise children." Outside magazine calls Madison a "Dream Town"; The Utne Reader calls it one of America's "10 Most Enlightened Towns" and "The Heartland's Progressive Hotbed." In addition, Sports Illustrated called Madison America's #1 College Sports Town, while Prevention magazine labeled it one of its "12 Best Walking Towns."

Historical Information: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 816 State Street, Madison, WI 53706; telephone (608)264-6534