Janesville, WI

Janesville, Wisconsin
City
Downtown Janesville looking south on Main Street (2004)
Nickname(s): "Wisconsin's Park Place" "Bower City"
Location in Rock County and the state of Wisconsin.
Janesville, Wisconsin Location in the United States
Coordinates: 42°41′2″N 89°0′59″W / 42.68389°N 89.01639°W / 42.68389; -89.01639Coordinates: 42°41′2″N 89°0′59″W / 42.68389°N 89.01639°W / 42.68389; -89.01639
Municipality	City
Incorporated	1853
Government
• City manager	Mark Freitag
Area
• City	34.45 sq mi (89.23 km2)
• Land	33.86 sq mi (87.70 km2)
• Water	0.59 sq mi (1.53 km2)
Population (2010)
• City	63,575
• Estimate (2012)	63,588
• Density	1,877.6/sq mi (724.9/km2)
• Metro	160,092
Time zone	Central (UTC−6)
• Summer (DST)	CDT (UTC−5)
Area code(s)	608
Website	www.ci.janesville.wi.us

Janesville is a city in southern Wisconsin, United States. It is the county seat and largest city of Rock County, and the principal municipality of the Janesville, Wisconsin Metropolitan Statistical Area. As of the 2010 census, the city had a population of 63,575.

The Janesville area was home to many Native American tribes before the settlement of people from the East. With the Indian Removal Act of 1830, many Native American peoples were uprooted and forced out of their homelands to make room for the new settlers, with many Native peoples, including the Ho-Chunk and Potawatomi, being forced onto reservations.

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 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 English Puritans who settled New England in the 1600s. The completion of the Erie Canal caused a surge in New England 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.