Janesville (Wisconsin)

Janesville is a city in Rock County, Wisconsin, United States. It is the county seat and largest city in the county. It is a principal municipality of the Janesville, Wisconsin, Metropolitan Statistical Area and is included in the Madison-Janesville-Beloit, WI Combined Statistical Area. As of the 2020 census, the city had a population of 65,615. American settlers John Inman, George Follmer, Joshua Holmes, and William Holmes, Jr. built a crude log cabin in the region in 1835. Later that year, one key settler named Henry F. Janes, a native of Virginia who was a self-proclaimed woodsman and early city planner, arrived in what is now Rock County. Janes came to the area in the early 1830s, and initially wanted to name the budding village "Blackhawk," after the famous Sauk leader, Chief Black Hawk, but was turned down by Post Office officials. After some discussion, it was settled that the town would be named after Janes himself and thus, in 1835, Janesville was founded. Despite being named after a Virginian, Janesville was founded by immigrants from New England. These were old stock Yankee immigrants, descended from the EnglishPuritans who settled New England in the 1600s. The completion of the Erie Canal caused a surge in New Englander immigration to what was then the Northwest Territory. Some of them were from upstate New York, and had parents who had moved to that region from New England shortly after the Revolutionary War. New Englanders, and New England transplants from upstate New York, were the vast majority of Janesville's inhabitants during the first several decades of its history. Land surveys encouraged pioneers to settle in the area among the abundance of fertile farmland and woodlands. Many of these early settlers established farms and began cultivating wheat and other grains.