James Duane Doty's Paper City
Near Madison, Wisconsin
In the autumn of eighteen thirty-six, the legislators of the Wisconsin Territory gathered in the small town of Belmont to make a single consequential decision: where would the capital of this new territory be?
James Duane Doty showed up with a map.
Doty was a territorial judge and a land speculator, a combination that in the eighteen thirties did not strike anyone as particularly unusual. He had spent the preceding months quietly purchasing roughly a thousand acres of land on an isthmus between two lakes, land he had surveyed and platted into a city that did not yet exist. He called it Madison, after the recently deceased President James Madison. The streets fanning out from a central square were named after signers of the Constitution, among them Carroll, Pinckney, and Hamilton.
It was, in every practical sense, a paper city. No houses. No roads. No residents. Only Doty's map and Doty's considerable persuasive gifts.
What made Madison's selection remarkable, then and now, is the audacity of it. Green Bay had actual settlers. Milwaukee had a nascent commercial district. Mineral Point had lead mines. Madison had a very nice map and a judge who was willing to distribute real estate to people who might be in a position to influence a vote.
The Wisconsin Historical Society's account notes that Doty offered shares in his Madison land company to several legislators at advantageous prices. On November twenty-eighth, eighteen thirty-six, the legislature voted: Madison would be the territorial capital.
The city had to be built from nothing, in winter, in a swamp between two lakes. Within a decade it had a statehouse, a university, and enough of a population to function. Doty's gamble worked. He was eventually rewarded, in eighteen forty-one, with an appointment as governor of the territory, though he served with considerably more controversy than he had lobbied with charm.
The isthmus he bought is today the most densely governed square mile in Wisconsin: Capitol Square on one end, the University of Wisconsin on the other, a mile of State Street in between.
