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About Madison

Madison, Wisconsin facts: 30 fun facts about the city of four lakes

Quick, sourced facts about Wisconsin's capital city, for trivia night, a school report or settling an argument. Every fact below was checked in November 2026 against the U.S. Census Bureau, the State of Wisconsin, the City of Madison, Dane County, UW–Madison, Destination Madison or the other sources listed at the end.

Checked against official sources · Updated November 2, 2026

The city

  1. Population: about 286,000. The Census Bureau estimates 286,233 residents as of July 2025, up from 269,840 in the 2020 Census.
  2. Dane County has an estimated 590,375 people, making it the second most populous county in Wisconsin.
  3. Named for a president: James Duane Doty named the city in 1836 after James Madison, the fourth U.S. president, and named downtown streets after signers of the Constitution. Destination Madison counts thirty of them. See our history of Madison.
  4. Capital before it was a town: the legislature chose Madison as the territorial capital in 1836, when it existed only on paper. It became a city in 1856.
  5. Size: about 84 square miles of land and 21 square miles of water, by the Census Bureau's 2024 figures.

Lakes and the isthmus

  1. An isthmus city: downtown sits on a narrow strip of land between Lakes Mendota and Monona. Destination Madison calls Madison one of only two major U.S. cities built on an isthmus.
  2. "Four Lakes," but five lakes: the Ho-Chunk name for the area, Teejop, means Four Lakes: Mendota, Monona, Waubesa and Kegonsa, linked by the Yahara River. Little Lake Wingra, inside the city, isn't one of the four.
  3. Lake Mendota is the giant: about 9,800 acres and up to 83 feet deep, by Dane County's figures. Monona covers about 3,300 acres. See our lakes guide.
  4. Thousands of years of history: the Madison area has one of the highest concentrations of surviving effigy mounds, earthen mounds shaped like animals and built roughly 700 to 1,700 years ago.

The Capitol

  1. 284 feet tall: from the ground floor to the top of its statue, the State Capitol is 284.4 feet, about 3.5 feet shorter than the U.S. Capitol.
  2. The only granite dome in the U.S., and the largest dome by volume in the country, according to the State of Wisconsin. The granite comes from Bethel, Vermont.
  3. Height limit: under state law, no part of a building within one mile of the Capitol may rise above 1,032.8 feet above sea level. Buildings from before 1990 are exempt.
  4. The fifth capitol: the current building, finished in 1917, is the fifth to serve as Wisconsin's capitol since 1836. Free tours run every day; see our museums guide.
  5. "Wisconsin" on top: the gilded bronze statue on the dome, by Daniel Chester French, is 15 feet 5 inches tall.

Only in Madison

  1. The official city bird is a plastic pink flamingo, named in 2009. It dates to 1979, when UW student government pranksters planted 1,008 plastic flamingos on Bascom Hill.
  2. "Mad City": Destination Madison says the nickname was coined in 1974 by UW student James McKiernan on a T-shirt.
  3. The nation's largest producers-only farmers market: the Dane County Farmers' Market rings the Capitol Square on Saturdays from mid-April to early November. It started in 1972 with five farmers. See our farmers markets guide.
  4. Frank Lloyd Wright's long wait: Wright first designed Monona Terrace in 1938; it opened in 1997.
  5. Ten sister cities, including Freiburg (Germany), Obihiro (Japan), Mantova (Italy), Vilnius (Lithuania) and Cusco (Peru).
  6. Parks and paths: about 270 parks, more than 200 miles of off-road and multi-use paths and 12 public beaches, per Destination Madison. See our getting around guide.

Weather and the university

  1. Winters are real: January averages 19.4°F, with an average high of 27°F, at the city's official weather station (1991–2020 normals).
  2. Summers are pleasant: July averages 71.9°F, with an average high of 82°F.
  3. About 52 inches of snow fall in a typical winter. See our winter guide.
  4. UW–Madison had 51,822 students in fall 2025 and a 939-acre main campus. It was founded in 1848, the same year Wisconsin became a state. See our UW campus guide.
  5. The biggest employer in the region is UW–Madison, followed by Epic Systems in Verona, according to the Madison Region Economic Partnership.

Famous names and moments

  1. Born in Madison: playwright Thornton Wilder (1897), actress Gena Rowlands (1930) and physicist John Bardeen (1908), who studied at UW–Madison and is the only person to win the Nobel Prize in Physics twice: for the transistor in 1956 and for the theory of superconductivity in 1972.
  2. Otis Redding's last flight: on December 10, 1967, the soul singer's plane crashed into Lake Monona as it approached Madison, where he was due to play a club called The Factory that night. Redding was 26; Bar-Kays trumpeter Ben Cauley was the only survivor. "(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay," released weeks after his death, went to No. 1.
  3. Why "Badgers": the Wisconsin Historical Society traces the Badger State nickname to Wisconsin's early lead miners, who lived in holes dug into the ground instead of building homes. UW–Madison's teams carry the name; see our game day guide.
  4. No. 1 place to live: in 1996, Money magazine ranked Madison and the rest of Dane County first among the 300 biggest U.S. metro areas in its Best Places to Live list.
  5. A beer festival with history: the Great Taste of the Midwest, run by the volunteer Madison Homebrewers and Tasters Guild, fills Olin Park on Lake Monona on the second Saturday of August. The 2026 festival was its 39th. See our breweries guide.

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Sources

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