Page 9

                              EARLY ANNALS OF THE TOWN.                 
                      9
                                     CHAPTER II.
                     Early ~4nnals of the Town - 1838-1845.
       The town of Madison was a plant of slow growth. In the summer of 1838,
the census re-
   vealed the presence in the settlement of. only sixty-two people, and it
is recorded 1 that there
  k. Condition  were at that time "not more than a dozen houses,
built
and in process of erection,
   In 1838.     counting every cabin and shanty within three miles of the
Capitol;" while Indian
I wigwams were frequently erected within sight of the doors.  For. the matter
of that, we can
   still~sixty-one years later (1899), with a population of nearly 20,000-frequently
see Winne-
   bago tepees on the shores of Lakes Mendota and Monona; especially upon
the latter, a mile-and-a-
   half from the Capitol.
       The little village was charmingly situated in the primeval wilderness.
    In 1885, the late
   Jerome IR. Brigham - a nephew of the Blue Mounds pioneer, Ebenezer, and
himself one of
   A sylvan     Madison's early teachers - thus wrote of the Madison of his
young manhood.:
   Capital.     "Those who only know of Madison, now, have but a
feeble
conception of its won-
   derful and fasci-                                                    
         nating beauty at
         the time I first saw
   the beginning. At
   our Capital [1839]                                                   
         it had the look of
   a well-kept lawn,                                                    
         shaded byfine
   white-oak and                                                        
         burr-oak trees,
   with   a fragrant                                                    
         fringe of red cedar
   all about the lake                                                   
         shores. There was
   no growth of nfl-                                                    
         derbrush and
   thicket such as                                                      
         Sprung up soon,
   when the semi-an-                                                    
         nual fires ceased
   to do the duty of                                                    
         the rake and
   mower;     but the                                                   
         eye had a stretch
   quite uninter-                                                       
         rupted, except as
   the surface rose                                                     
         in beautiful green
   knolls on either                                                     
         lake. There was
   no fence about the
         square, and none
   of  the    present            TURVILLE'S BEACH, LAKE MONONA          
         trees, I think. If
   there were black-oaks among them, they fail to relnaifi in the picture
I recall. The lakes then
   lay in natural silver beauty, prettily framed in pebbly beach, now lost
by the dam on Mendota
   and the railways on Monona.   Madison in 1839 was wonderfully beautiful
- not rugged or ro-
   Inantic, which is ordinarily picturesque, but for simple, quiet beauty,
unequalled by anything
   I rem~i~b~',
~;     In the early annals of this peaceful village in the undulating oak
grove between Mendota
   and Mono,~a,~ surrounded on every hand by far-stretching lakes and marshes,
and thus in a
   measure isolated from her rural neighbors,- the historian finds little
of stirring interest; and that
       I Robert L. Ream's reminiscences, in Durrie's History of .2ifadison
(Madison, 1874), p. 102.