Wisconsin's Capitol City on the isthmus between two lakes — where Madison occupies the most unusual urban geography in the Midwest: a narrow isthmus between Lake Mendota (the largest lake in Dane County — 39 km² of Class A water quality, where UW crew teams practice at dawn and ice fishing shacks appear in January on 60 cm of ice) and Lake Monona (where Frank Lloyd Wright proposed the Monona Terrace civic center in 1938 but it wasn't built until 1997, six years after the Terrace won a design competition among schemes for the lakefront), the Wisconsin State Capitol (a 1917 Neoclassical building with the tallest dome of any state capitol in the USA by height above ground level — 95 metres — and the only granite dome in the USA) rises at the centre of the isthmus, the Dane County Farmers' Market (every Saturday morning April–November around the Capitol Square — the largest producer-only farmers' market in the United States, where only the farmer who grew or made the product can sell it at the stand) is the most significant weekly food market in the Midwest, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus (on the south shore of Lake Mendota — the public university that created the 'Wisconsin Idea': the principle that the university's walls should be the state's borders, bringing academic expertise to every Wisconsin citizen through the extension system) is one of the most beautiful public university campuses in the United States
Madison (270,000 city; 700,000 metro) is the capital of Wisconsin and the home of the University of Wisconsin-Madison — a progressive university and government city on an isthmus between two lakes in the southern Wisconsin agricultural plain, 230 km north of Chicago. Madison consistently ranks among the most livable cities in the United States for quality of life, walkability, and access to outdoor recreation.
The Ho-Chunk Nation (Winnebago) inhabited the Madison isthmus for thousands of years — the four lakes of Dane County (Mendota, Monona, Waubesa, Kegonsa) formed a significant resource complex used seasonally. Madison was platted as the state capital in 1836, before Wisconsin even had significant European settlement, by James Doty (the territorial governor, who chose the isthmus location partly because he personally speculated in the land). The University of Wisconsin was established in 1848, the same year Wisconsin achieved statehood. The 'Wisconsin Idea' — articulated in 1904 by university pr…