Grant County, Wisconsin

Grant County, Wisconsin
Grant County Courthouse, Armand D. Koch, architect, 1902
Location in the U.S. state of Wisconsin
Wisconsin's location in the U.S.
Founded	1837
Seat	Lancaster
Largest city	Platteville
Area
• Total	1,183 sq mi (3,064 km2)
• Land	1,147 sq mi (2,971 km2)
• Water	36 sq mi (93 km2), 3.1%
Population
• (2010)	51,208
• Density	45/sq mi (17/km²)
Congressional district	3rd
Time zone	Central: UTC-6/-5
Website	www.co.grant.wi.gov

Grant County is a county located in the U.S. state of Wisconsin. As of the 2010 census, the population was 51,208. Its county seat is Lancaster.

Grant County comprises the Platteville, WI Micropolitan Statistical Area. It is in the tri-state area of Illinois, Iowa, and Wisconsin, and is crossed by travelers commuting to Madison from a number of eastern Iowan cities, and by residents of northern Illinois traveling to the Twin Cities or La Crosse, Wisconsin.

What is now Grant County was largely uninhabited prior to contact with Europeans, as it was a border region between the territories of the Kickapoo, Menominee, and Illinois tribes. The only Native American group to have a permanent settlement in the area was the Meskwaki, sometimes known as the Fox, who had a temporary village in what is now the extreme northeast of the county during the mid-1700s.

Between 1520 and 1620 this area was nominally ruled by Spain, though no Spaniard or anyone who claimed loyalty to Spain had ever come within five hundred miles of the region during this time, and as such, Spanish authority went completely unfelt in what is now Grant County, Wisconsin.

The first Frenchmen to reach what is now Grant County were Jacques Marquette and Louis Joliet who explored the region in the spring of 1673, when they set out from what would later become Green Bay. No permanent settlement was made. In 1680 Louis Hennepin also passed through the region that would later become Grant County, also making no permanent settlement. In 1689 Nicholas Perrot passed through the territory and claimed it for the King of France. The first known settlement by a European came in 1725 when a trading post was established by Pierriere Marin. Later the French would abandon it.