A Brief History of Madison, WI

Madison was created in 1836 when former federal judge James Duane Doty bought over a thousand acres of swamp and forestland on the isthmus between Lake Mendota and Lake Monona within the Four Lakes Region, with the intention of building a city on the site. The Wisconsin Territory had been created earlier that year and the territorial legislature had convened in Belmont, Wisconsin. One of the legislature's tasks was to choose a permanent location for the territory's capital. Doty assisted aggressively for the legislature to select Madison as the new capital, offering buffalo robes to the legislators and promising choice Madison lots at discount prices to undecided voters. Doty had James Slaughter draw out two cities in the area, Madison and "The City of Four Lakes," near present-day Middleton. Despite the fact that Madison was still only a city on paper, the territorial legislature voted in favor of Madison as its capital, primarily because of its location halfway between the new and growing cities around Milwaukee in the east and the post of Prairie du Chien in the west.