Janesville, Wisconsin

Janesville, the seat of Rock County in southern Wisconsin, was settled in eighteen thirty-five by Henry Janes, a Virginia-born woodsman who staked a claim at a ford on the Rock River and gave the town his name. The Rock River ford made it a natural crossing point, and when Wisconsin became a territory in eighteen thirty-six, Janesville grew quickly as a supply center for surrounding farms. By the Civil War it was one of the larger Wisconsin cities, sustained by agriculture, milling, and manufacturing.

In the twentieth century Janesville became most closely associated with General Motors, which began building Chevrolet cars there in nineteen twenty-three, in a plant that went idle in December of two thousand eight as the Great Recession devastated American auto manufacturing. At its peak the plant employed as many as seven thousand workers and anchored the entire regional economy. The closure, one of the most closely watched in the country, was chronicled in Amy Goldstein's book Janesville, which examined how a company town rebuilds after its company leaves.