Madison, Wisconsin: a capital chosen on paper and sold with buffalo robes
In 1836 Wisconsin's territorial lawmakers chose a capital that existed only as a surveyor's plan on an isthmus between two lakes. James Duane Doty had lobbied hard, handing out buffalo robes to shivering legislators and cheap lots to waverers. His paper town grew into Madison, a lakeside city of 269,840 people at the 2020 census.
People lived around the lakes for roughly 12,000 years before Europeans arrived. The Ho-Chunk knew the area as Teejop, the land of four lakes: Mendota, Monona, Waubesa and Kegonsa. Effigy mounds built for ceremony and burial more than 1,000 years earlier dotted the surrounding prairie, and dugout canoes pulled from nearby waters are fuelling new research.
Doty, a former federal judge, bought 1,261 acres of swamp and woodland in 1829 for $1,500. When legislators gathered in Belmont to settle on a permanent seat, he pressed his case, and they approved it on November 28, 1836, mainly because the site lay midway between Milwaukee and Prairie du Chien and between the southwestern lead mines and Green Bay. He honoured James Madison, who had died that June 28, and named streets after the other 38 signers of the Constitution. A capitol cornerstone went down in 1837, the village counted 626 residents in 1846, and by the time it became a city in 1856 it had 6,863.
Statehood in 1848 brought a university, created on July 26 that year by Governor Nelson Dewey on a 50-acre site facing the capitol; its main hall, now Bascom Hall, opened in 1859. During the Civil War, Camp Randall served the Union as a training ground, hospital and prison for captured Confederates, and the university later absorbed it, opening Camp Randall Stadium in 1917. That same year the current capitol was completed, begun in 1906 after its predecessor burned in 1904.
The metropolitan area now holds an estimated 708,000 residents, and in 2024 Madison was the state's fastest-growing city. It ranks among the largest American cities for parks per head, is known for cycling, and has nine National Historic Landmarks, several by Frank Lloyd Wright. Visitors spent over $1 billion there in 2018, drawn to places such as the Henry Vilas Zoo and the Chazen Museum of Art.
Source: Madison, Wisconsin
