Verona, Wisconsin: From Farm Town to Epic Systems
Near Madison, Wisconsin
Verona was incorporated as a village in nineteen twenty-one on land southwest of Madison that had been agricultural since the mid-nineteenth century. For most of its life it was a modest dairy-country community of a few thousand people, the kind of place that existed at the edge of every Midwestern college city. Then Epic Systems, a medical software company, moved its headquarters to Verona in the nineteen nineties and began expanding.
Today Epic occupies a sprawling campus on the city's west side that resembles a theme park more than a software company, with themed buildings, a monorail, and tens of thousands of employees. Verona grew from about fifty-four hundred residents in nineteen ninety to more than fifteen thousand today, entirely on the momentum of one company and its founder Judy Faulkner.
