110 Fun Facts About Madison, Wisconsin

Madison's original downtown streets were named for the men who signed which document?

The US Constitution: the founder named his paper city for James Madison, who had died months earlier, and its streets for the other signers while lobbying lawmakers to make it the capital.

The Ho-Chunk name for the Madison area, Teejop, means what?

Land of the four lakes: more than a thousand years ago, mound builders ringed those lakes with earthworks shaped like bears, birds and water spirits.

Which land speculator handed out buffalo robes and cheap lots to get Madison chosen as Wisconsin's capital?

James Duane Doty: once the vote was won, his own partner, Michigan governor Stevens Mason, called him 'a liar, a calumniator and a swindler' and warned buyers away.

Where does Madison rank among Wisconsin's cities by population?

Second-largest: only Milwaukee is bigger, but Milwaukee has lost about a fifth of its people since its 1960 peak, while Madison added nearly 37,000 in the 2010s.

The Wisconsin State Capitol has the only dome in the United States clad in which stone?

Granite: the white stone came from Bethel, Vermont, picked for its durability and a colour pale enough to pass for marble.

Old Abe, a Civil War regimental mascot who later lived in the Wisconsin Capitol, was what kind of animal?

A bald eagle: carried into battle on a perch by the 8th Wisconsin Infantry, he retired to a two-room Capitol apartment with his own bathtub and now flies on the 101st Airborne's shoulder patch.

Why is the Capitol still the tallest building in Madison?

State law caps buildings within a mile of it: nothing may rise above the base of the columns around the dome, so the Capitol stays in view from most of the city.

Wisconsin's current Capitol was built between 1906 and 1917 after its predecessor did what?

Burned down in 1904: a gas jet set fire to freshly varnished woodwork soon after lawmakers had chosen to drop the building's fire insurance, leaving the state to bear the whole loss.

The University of Wisconsin was founded in 1848, the year Wisconsin did what?

Became a state: Wisconsin joined the Union in May 1848 and chartered its university that July, yet the first classes met the next February in temporary quarters near the Capitol, two years before the campus had a building.

What is the full name of UW's mascot, Bucky?

Buckingham U. Badger: students picked the name in a 1949 contest, and the U. is his whole middle name; the story that it stands for Ulysses is a campus myth.

Camp Randall Stadium stands on ground that served what purpose during the Civil War?

Training Union Army soldiers: some 70,000 Wisconsin recruits drilled at the camp, and when the site was later slated to be sold off as house lots, veterans persuaded the state to buy it.

At Badger home football games, when do the students 'Jump Around' to the House of Pain song?

Between the third and fourth quarters: when officials quietly dropped the song for the 2003 opener, amid stadium construction and unease about the swaying upper deck, the outcry had it back within days.

Which team is the Badgers' opponent in the most-played rivalry in college football's top division?

Minnesota: the rivals' first trophy, a wooden Slab of Bacon, vanished in the 1940s and turned up in a Camp Randall storage room in 1994; they now play for Paul Bunyan's Axe.

Which Badger running back won the 1999 Heisman while setting the NCAA career rushing record?

Ron Dayne: most colleges wanted the 270-pound teenager at fullback, but Wisconsin promised him the ball, and he carried it past Ricky Williams's year-old career record.

Which Wisconsin pro team did Herb Kohl, the senator who gave $25 million for the Kohl Center, own?

Milwaukee Bucks: Kohl bought the team in 1985 to stop it leaving the state, and his 1995 gift for the arena was then the largest single donation the university system had received.

The Dane County Farmers' Market, held Saturdays around Capitol Square, is America's largest market of what kind?

Producers-only: the mayor launched it in 1972 to bring the county's farmers and city dwellers together, and every stall is still staffed by the people who grew or made the goods.

The Vilas family donated the land for Madison's Henry Vilas Zoo in 1904 on what condition?

Free admission forever: William and Anna Vilas gave the parkland in memory of their son Henry, who died young of diabetes, and the zoo that grew there from 1911 has never charged.

The Memorial Union Terrace's iconic metal chairs feature what design on their backs?

A sunburst: a rival chair design trapped rain and rusted, so the sunbursts took over, painted John Deere green, Allis-Chalmers orange and sunshine yellow in a nod to Wisconsin farming.

Olbrich Botanical Gardens' gilded sala pavilion was a gift from which country's king?

It was a gift to the university via the Thai chapter of the Wisconsin Alumni Association and King Bhumibol Adulyadej.

Which satirical publication did two UW students start as a weekly paper in Madison in 1988?

The Onion: its two founders soon sold the paper to staff cartoonist Scott Dikkers and partners, and the newsroom left Madison for New York in 2001.

Which health-records software giant, founded by Judy Faulkner in 1979, is based in Verona, Wisconsin?

Epic Systems: Faulkner started it in a basement in 1979 with about $70,000 from colleagues, has never taken venture capital, and moved it from Madison to its Verona campus in 2005.

American Girl dolls were launched from the Madison area in 1986 by which founder?

Pleasant Rowland: a visit to Colonial Williamsburg gave the former textbook author the idea of teaching history through dolls; Mattel bought her company for $700 million in 1998.

Which meat brand bought a Madison plant in 1919 and made the city its headquarters in 1957?

Oscar Mayer: the Chicago firm's first expansion became its headquarters and the home of the Wienermobile, until owner Kraft Heinz shut the plant and moved the offices back to Chicago.

Which bicycle maker, based in Waterloo near Madison, began building steel touring frames in 1976?

Trek: it started with a payroll of five, hand-building steel frames to take on Japanese and Italian imports, and its bikes later carried Lance Armstrong through the Tour de France.

Otis Redding's plane crashed into which Madison lake in December 1967?

Lake Monona: the crash came three days after he finished recording '(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay', which became the first posthumous number one on the Billboard Hot 100; one bandmate survived.

Which Saturday Night Live comedian was born in Madison in 1964 and attended Edgewood High School?

Chris Farley: after college he worked at his father's oil company in Madison and learned improv at a local theatre, later naming his shouting motivational speaker Matt Foley after a rugby teammate.

Which three-time Pulitzer Prize winner, author of Our Town, was born in Madison?

Thornton Wilder: his father ran the Wisconsin State Journal until a 1906 posting as US consul general in Hong Kong took the family to China, where Thornton spent part of his boyhood.

Which Scottish singer fronts the rock band Garbage, formed in Madison in 1993 with Butch Vig?

Shirley Manson: guitarist Steve Marker spotted her on MTV fronting Angelfish; her first audition in Madison flopped, but she asked for a second try and got the job.

Butch Vig's Smart Studios in Madison recorded which 1991 debut album by The Smashing Pumpkins?

Gish: Butch Vig co-produced it over the winter of 1990-91 with a longer schedule and bigger budget than he had ever had, and the same year he produced Nirvana's Nevermind.

The 1970 Sterling Hall bombing at UW targeted which military-funded unit?

The Army Mathematics Research Center: the van bomb barely touched its upper-floor offices but wrecked the physics labs below, killing researcher Robert Fassnacht, who had no link to the military work.

The Mifflin Street Block Party began in 1969 as a street protest against what?

The Vietnam War: the street dance had no permit, police moved in with tear gas and clubs, and the weekend ended with about 70 people injured and more than 100 arrested.

Which activist arrested at the 1969 Mifflin Street Block Party became mayor in 1973?

Paul Soglin: then a young alderman, he was arrested twice that weekend; four years later he unseated Bill Dyke, the mayor whose police had made the arrests, to begin the first of three spells in office.

What is Madison's official city bird?

The plastic flamingo: the city council adopted it in 2009 to honour the September day in 1979 when student pranksters covered Bascom Hill with 1,008 of the lawn ornaments.

In 1979 UW pranksters made which landmark seem to rise from a frozen Madison lake?

Statue of Liberty: the Pail and Shovel Party, voted in to run the student government on a promise of mischief, built her head and torch on the ice as if the rest stood on the lake bed.

Madison's first professional soccer team, founded in 2018 as a USL League One club, is called what?

Forward Madison: fans voted on the name, which beat whimsical nominees such as the Curds and the Holsteins; 'Forward' is Wisconsin's state motto.

The Madison Mallards, who play at Warner Park, compete in which summer baseball circuit?

The Northwoods League: its teams field college players for the summer, and after three pro clubs came and went, the Mallards arrived in 2001 and by the 2010s were drawing about 6,000 fans a game, the most in the league.

Madison's Great Taste of the Midwest, held every August since 1987, celebrates what?

Craft beer: a homebrewers' club runs the festival and gives the proceeds to local charities, and tickets for North America's second-longest-running event of its kind sell out each May.

Harry Steenbock's 1923 patented process used ultraviolet light to boost which nutrient in milk?

Vitamin D: Steenbock paid $300 to patent the process himself, turned down a buyout from Quaker Oats, and helped set up an alumni foundation so the royalties would fund university research.

Which UW president vowed the university's influence would reach every family in the state?

Charles Van Hise: he won the presidency with the backing of the governor, an old classmate from the class of 1879, and his pledge became the creed known as the Wisconsin Idea.

The UW-Madison Arboretum, a 1930s pioneer of ecological restoration, is home to the oldest restored example of which landscape?

Prairie: from 1935, Civilian Conservation Corps crews working for university ecologists replanted an old farm field with native grasses, an experiment that launched the practice of ecological restoration.

Which Petronas Towers architect designed Madison's Overture Center for the Arts, opened in 2004?

César Pelli: he wrapped the new halls around the restored 1928 Capitol Theater, and the whole $205 million bill was met by gifts from a Madison couple.

In 2015 Madison became only the fifth US city to earn which Bicycle Friendly Community rating?

Platinum: Madison joined Boulder, Fort Collins, Davis and Portland, a goal its mayor said many had thought unreachable when the city and local cyclists set out to win it.

Campaigning for governor in 1978, Lee Dreyfus called Madison 30 square miles surrounded by what?

Reality: the Republican's dig at the liberal capital stuck, and the number grew with the city until a mayor proposed '77 Square Miles Surrounded by Reality' as the official motto in 2013.

William Evjue founded Madison's Capital Times in 1917 after the State Journal abandoned which anti-war progressive?

Robert La Follette: Evjue quit as the State Journal's business manager over its attacks on the senator's stand against entering World War I and built a rival daily on 'Fighting Bob's' ideas.

What is the UW Marching Band's post-game show at Madison's Camp Randall, a tradition since 1969, called?

The Fifth Quarter: it began in 1969, with the football team deep in a losing run, to keep fans in the stands after the final whistle, and it ends with the crowd singing 'Varsity'.

Madison's Dane County Regional Airport shares its site with which Air National Guard base, named for a pilot killed in 1941?

Truax Field: Lt. Thomas Truax, a Madison native, died in a training crash weeks before Pearl Harbor, and the base that took his name spent the war schooling radio operators and mechanics.

Which zoologist and future UW president documented Lake Mendota's first known toxic algae blooms in 1882?

Edward Birge: he went on to found an influential school of limnology on its shore and studied the lake for some sixty years, and Mendota is now called the most studied lake in the world.

Frank Lloyd Wright's Jacobs House in Madison, a UNESCO site, is widely seen as the first of which affordable house type?

Usonian: a young reporter asked Wright for a house costing $5,000, and the result drew so many sightseers that the family charged admission; dozens of similar homes followed across the country.

What is the name of Frank Lloyd Wright's hillside home and studio near Spring Green, west of Madison?

Taliesin: Wright began it in 1911 on land near his mother's family, rebuilt the living quarters after fires in 1914 and 1925, and ran his practice from there for the rest of his life.

What is Frank Lloyd Wright's lakefront convention centre in Madison, proposed in 1938 and opened in 1997, called?

Monona Terrace: Wright was still reworking the design in 1959, the year he died, and it gathered dust until a 1992 referendum approved building it; one of his apprentices designed the interior.

Madison has no Amtrak trains, so its nearest station is in which town to the northeast?

Columbus: Madison lost its last passenger trains in 1971, so riders drive out to this small town to board the daily Empire Builder or the Borealis, a route added in 2024.

Which pizza chain originated in Madison?

Rocky Rococo: the founders borrowed the name from a Firesign Theatre comedy villain; the troupe joked about it on a visit to the first shop, then threatened to sue a decade later.

Besides Mendota and Monona, which smaller lake lies entirely inside Madison, linked to the Yahara chain by a creek?

Wingra Park's boathouse rents paddle boats and canoes, and Henry Vilas Zoo sits on its shore.

Downtown Madison sits on an isthmus between which two lakes?

Mendota and Monona: the squeeze between them gave the city its 'Lake, City, Lake' trademark, and the Capitol was built on the strip's high point.

In which town did Wisconsin's territorial legislature meet in 1836 when it chose Madison as capital?

Belmont: lawmakers shivered through that session in an unheated council house, then voted to move the capital to Madison, a city that still existed only on paper.

Which Madison-born politician was the first openly gay person elected to the US Senate?

Tammy Baldwin: raised in Madison by her grandparents, she sat on the city council while still a UW law student and won a House seat in 1998 before taking the Senate seat in 2012.

Which blood thinner, first sold as rat poison, was developed at UW-Madison and named after its alumni research foundation?

Warfarin: Karl Paul Link's lab found it while tracing why cattle bled to death after eating spoiled sweet clover; the name joins WARF, the foundation's initials, to the end of 'coumarin'.

In 1998 UW-Madison's James Thomson became the first scientist to isolate which human cells?

Embryonic stem cells: able to become any tissue in the body, they stirred years of ethical debate because they came from human embryos, and in 2007 Thomson's lab made similar cells from ordinary skin.

Which governor's 2011 bill curbing public-union bargaining sparked mass protests at Wisconsin's Capitol?

Scott Walker: the bill, Act 10, brought as many as 100,000 protesters to Madison and led to a recall vote, which in 2012 he became the first US governor to survive.

Which historic Madison movie palace stands a block from the Capitol on State Street?

The Orpheum Theater: it opened in 1927 with a newsreel, a silent film with live organ and vaudeville acts, and its towering marquee became an icon of State Street.

University of Wisconsin pranksters once made which landmark appear to rise from a frozen Madison lake?

The Statue of Liberty stunt showed only the torch and the top of the head on the ice, as if the rest stood on the lake bed, echoing the ending of Planet of the Apes.

A museum in Middleton, just outside Madison, displays more than 5,000 varieties of which condiment?

Mustard filled the museum after its founder began collecting jars in 1986, despondent that his Boston Red Sox had lost the World Series.

Which future aviation hero quit his engineering studies at the University of Wisconsin in Madison?

Charles Lindbergh left Madison midway through his second year to learn to fly, five years before his solo crossing from New York to Paris.

Wisconsin's Badgers take their nickname from which 1820s settlers, who wintered in hillside burrows?

Lead miners who came to Wisconsin in the 1820s and 1830s had no winter shelter, so they dug into hillsides like badgers. The university adopted the animal as its mascot in 1889.

Which US president's seated bronze has overlooked Madison's Bascom Hill since 1909?

Abraham Lincoln arrived on the hill in the centennial year of his birth. The bronze is a copy of Adolph Weinman's sculpture in Hodgenville, near the president's birthplace.

Which campus comedy used the University of Wisconsin in Madison as its fictional Grand Lakes University?

Back to School stars Rodney Dangerfield as a millionaire who enrols alongside his son. Novelist Kurt Vonnegut appears as himself, hired to write a paper on his own work.

Which Seattle-scene grunge band spent a week recording with Butch Vig at Madison's Smart Studios in 1990?

Nirvana liked what Vig had done for the Madison band Killdozer. The trio went back to him a year later to make Nevermind.

Which American painter was born in Sun Prairie and went to high school in Madison?

Georgia O'Keeffe boarded at Madison's Sacred Heart Academy in 1901 and 1902. A middle school in the city was renamed for her in 1993.

Which sausage stars at the Madison charity festival first held on Memorial Day weekend in 1983?

Bratwurst is the draw at Brat Fest, which grocer Tom Metcalfe started outside his Hilldale store and which grew into a fundraiser for local charities.

Which blood thinner, first sold as rat poison in 1948, was developed at the University of Wisconsin?

Warfarin takes its opening letters from WARF, the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, which funded Karl Paul Link's laboratory and was assigned the patent.

Which famous naturalist took his first botany lesson as a university student in Madison in the 1860s?

John Muir, later a founder of the Sierra Club, learned it under a black locust tree beside North Hall, where a classmate showed him that the towering tree is kin to the garden pea.

Madison's founder named the original downtown streets after which group of men?

Signers of the Constitution lent their names to streets drawn in 1836, when the city existed only on paper, before legislators voted it the capital that November.

In 1998, Madison biologist James Thomson became the first scientist to isolate what in a laboratory?

Human embryonic stem cells made the University of Wisconsin a major centre for the research, which its alumni foundation went on to help fund.

Madison-born physicist John Bardeen shared the first of his two Nobel Prizes for co-inventing which device?

The transistor earned him the 1956 prize, and a 1972 award for explaining superconductivity made him the only person to win the physics Nobel twice.

Which Madison-born speed skater won five individual gold medals at the 1980 Winter Olympics?

Eric Heiden set four Olympic records and a world record at those Lake Placid races, and later became a physician and a professional road cyclist.

Which future Super Bowl-winning quarterback spent a single season at Wisconsin, reaching the 2012 Rose Bowl?

Russell Wilson arrived from NC State in 2011 and set the single-season FBS record for passer rating. He had also played minor league baseball as a second baseman.

Which three-time NFL Defensive Player of the Year gave up a scholarship elsewhere to walk on at Wisconsin?

J.J. Watt left Central Michigan, where he had played tight end, to become a Badger defensive end, and delivered pizzas for a Pizza Hut in his home town of Pewaukee.

Which coach took Wisconsin's men's basketball team to back-to-back Final Fours in 2014 and 2015?

Bo Ryan lost the 2015 national title game 68–63 to Duke. He had earlier won a string of Division III championships at Wisconsin–Platteville.

Which coach rebuilt Wisconsin football in the 1990s, winning three Rose Bowls in seven seasons?

Barry Alvarez won the Rose Bowls of 1994, 1999 and 2000. He came to Madison from Notre Dame, where he ran the defense of the 1988 national champions.

Which fitness contest held six editions at Madison's Alliant Energy Center between 2017 and 2023?

The CrossFit Games came to Madison after seven years in Carson, California, and moved on to Fort Worth, Texas, in 2024.

Which future rock star formed his college band, the Ardells, as a student in Madison in 1961?

Steve Miller, later the singer of The Joker, was joined in the Ardells a year later by Boz Scaggs, the Dallas classmate he had taught guitar chords as a boy.

Which sketch comedy troupe did the future makers of Airplane! found as students in Madison in 1971?

Kentucky Fried Theater launched David Zucker, Jim Abrahams and Jerry Zucker, boyhood friends from Shorewood, toward their first sketch film in 1977.

Which Depression-era gangster film did Wisconsin alumnus Michael Mann partly shoot in Madison?

Public Enemies, with Johnny Depp as John Dillinger, also filmed at Little Bohemia Lodge in northern Wisconsin, the real site of a 1934 gunfight between the outlaw and the FBI.

Which conservationist became research director of the university arboretum in Madison in 1933?

Aldo Leopold, who wrote A Sand County Almanac, held the country's first professorship of wildlife management. The arboretum he guided has the world's oldest restored prairie.

Which Madison-born actress won four Emmys as Detective Mary Beth Lacey in the police drama Cagney & Lacey?

Tyne Daly was born in Madison to two actors, James Daly and Mary Hope, and her younger brother Tim followed them into the profession.

Native Americans built which animal-shaped structures around Madison's lakes more than 1,000 years ago?

Effigy mounds were raised for ceremonies and burials. One goose-shaped example in a city graveyard lost its head to grading for a railroad.

Which battery brand, born of 1906's French Battery Company, was based in Madison for decades?

Rayovac was succeeded in 2005 by the conglomerate Spectrum Brands, which later settled its own headquarters in the suburb of Middleton.

Which Madison-based insurer opened in 1927 as Farmers Mutual, selling car cover to rural drivers?

American Family took its present name in 1963, after Farmers Mutual had grown well beyond the farmers that founder Herman Wittwer first set out to insure.

Which classic bicycle brand did Madison-headquartered Pacific Cycle buy out of bankruptcy in 2001?

Schwinn and its sister brand GT cost Pacific Cycle $86 million after it outbid Huffy in court, and the bikes reached Walmart and Target a year later.

Which video game studio near Madison did art teacher Brian Raffel found with his brother in 1990?

Raven Software made the dark fantasy games Heretic and Hexen before joining Activision's Call of Duty teams in 2011.

Which nickname for Madison became the title of a 1997 thriller starring Dustin Hoffman and John Travolta?

Mad City was originally going to be set in Madison, and the Costa-Gavras film used the nickname as its title for its several meanings.

What do Madison locals call the US 12 freeway that serves the city's south and west sides?

The Beltline is a multi-lane freeway and the main link from the western suburb of Middleton to Cambridge, east of the city.

Wisconsin's governors have their official residence not in Madison itself but in which lakeside village?

Maple Bluff gained the governors after the state paid $47,500 in 1949 for a mansion begun in 1920 for a Madison industrialist.

Dane County, home to Madison, honors Nathan Dane, who helped draft which law for the frontier?

The Northwest Ordinance carried the Massachusetts delegate's amendment banning slavery in the territory that became Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin.

Which future Republican governor coined a 1978 campaign jibe casting Madison as an island cut off from the real world?

Lee Dreyfus made the crack on the campaign trail, and in 2013 the city council voted down a motion to adopt it as Madison's official punchline.

Which Madison-born politician became the first openly gay person elected to the US Senate in 2012?

Tammy Baldwin was raised in Madison by her grandparents, and in 1998 she had already become the first woman Wisconsin sent to Congress.

Which napalm maker's campus job interviews sparked a 1967 student sit-in in Madison?

Dow Chemical recruiters were blockaded inside the Commerce Building by student protesters, and the clash became the first campus war protest to end in police violence.

An 1894 report clearing Wisconsin economist Richard Ely became a famous defense of which principle?

Academic freedom was the report's cause. Ely, a pro-labor professor accused of teaching socialism and backing strikes, later called the document the Wisconsin Magna Charta.

Which Madison cemetery contains Confederate Rest, the northernmost Confederate graveyard in the nation?

Forest Hill holds about 140 Southern prisoners of war who died in 1862 while confined at Camp Randall, across town.

Which Baltic capital has been a sister city of Madison since 1988, the same year as Freiburg in Germany?

Vilnius was twinned with Madison in the Soviet era, two years before Lithuania announced its secession from the USSR.

Which cattle event, first held in 1967, takes over Madison's Alliant Energy Center each autumn?

World Dairy Expo ends with the judges naming a Supreme Champion cow, and its trade exhibition draws more than 600 companies.

The Madison Radicals debuted in 2013 as a professional club in which sport?

Ultimate frisbee gave Madison a title in 2018, when the Radicals won the league championship at a final weekend the city hosted.

The Madison Scouts, revived in 1938, tour North America as which kind of musical ensemble?

Drum and bugle corps answer to Drum Corps International, which the Scouts helped found as one of thirteen original members before winning its world title twice.

Which former Madison high school player scored twice in the 1980 Miracle on Ice?

Mark Johnson played at Madison Memorial High School and won a 1977 national title with the Badgers under his father, coach Bob Johnson.

Which Wisconsin fullback, nicknamed the Horse, won the 1954 Heisman Trophy, the first for the Badgers?

Alan Ameche went on to score the overtime touchdown that won the 1958 NFL Championship Game for the Baltimore Colts, often called the greatest game ever played.

Wisconsin professor Stephen Babcock gave farmers an 1890 test that measures what in milk?

Butterfat testing by his method became the worldwide standard, and Babcock went on to help develop the cold-curing process for ripening cheese.

IceCube, a neutrino observatory developed by the University of Wisconsin, is buried in ice where?

The South Pole detector spreads thousands of sensors through a cubic kilometre of Antarctic ice at the Amundsen–Scott station.

Which Hall of Fame receiver gave his nickname to Madison's Crazylegs Classic run?

Elroy Hirsch earned the name for a running style in which his legs twisted, and he was Wisconsin's athletic director from 1969 to 1987.

Frank Lloyd Wright designed a prow-roofed meeting house near Madison for which denomination?

Unitarians counted the architect as a member, and the congregation hauled the limestone blocks for the walls themselves to cut the cost.

Which march composer rated On, Wisconsin! above every other college marching song?

John Philip Sousa was not alone in his praise: some 2,500 schools have used a version of the 1909 tune, and it became the official state song in 1959.