Janesville, Wisconsin: The Town That Was Supposed to Be Black Hawk

Henry F. Janes wanted to call his Rock River settlement Black Hawk. The Postmaster General said no and named the post office Janesville instead, so the town got its founder’s name more or less by accident.

A claim marked in the snow

Janes told the story himself in a long letter that the 1879 history of Rock County printed in full. He picked the claim “that Janesville is built on” and marked it on February 15, 1836. He went snow-blind on that trip and had to rest about ten days before he could travel home. On May 19, 1836, around four in the afternoon, he brought his family up an Indian trail to a log cabin “eighteen feet square, with the bark on the logs, and no floor in it.”

He wasn’t trying to found a city. “I had, at this time, not the least idea of ever building up a town,” he wrote. But the road he opened past his cabin drew travelers headed for the lead mines, and they kept asking him for a way across the river. So he built a ferry.

Paper towns and a fight at Belmont

That ferry started a war. When Janes went to the territorial legislature at Belmont for a ferry charter, the owners of Rockport, Wisconsin City and Humes’ Ferry, rival town sites along the river, sent in a protest. Janes lumped Rockport and Wisconsin City in with the “paper towns” strung along the river, places that existed mostly as plats. He answered by laying out a town of his own. The county history says he surveyed and platted it in the spring of 1837, after the government land sale overlooked the quarter section his house stood on.

The railroad’s 1908 place-name book tells this part differently. It says the place itself was called Wisconsin City and Rockport “at various times,” until the territorial legislature settled the dispute in favor of Janesville. The 1879 history treats those as separate rival towns that faded away, and Janes’s own letter backs that up.

Black Hawk, refused

Here’s the part the name doesn’t tell you. At the end of his letter, Janes explains that he first called the place Black Hawk, since it had been “one of the old warrior’s camping-grounds.” He petitioned the Post Office Department for a post office by that name and recommended himself as postmaster. Amos Kendall, then Postmaster General, turned it down because there was already a Black Hawk post office in what’s now Iowa, and he “gave the name of Janesville to the post office.”

Gannett’s 1902 place-name dictionary confirms the short version: the city is “named for Henry F. Janes.” And the spot had a name long before Janes showed up. The federal place-name database says it was the site of a Winnebago village called E-nee-poro-poro, which it translates as “round rock,” after a large stone outcrop in the Rock River. In Wisconsin that people now goes by its own name, the Ho-Chunk Nation.

The founder who didn’t stay

Janes didn’t get to enjoy the town that carried his name. He spent years lobbying the legislature for roads and mail routes, then lost his land when the county seat was located at Janesville. By his own account he was “completely ‘strapped,’” and on August 24, 1839, he “left the town to its fate.” By 1849 he was in California. The 1879 history says he ended up in Humboldt County, and that he liked to boast “that railroads could not be built fast enough to catch him.” If you’re in Janesville today, you’re living in a town named for a man who kept moving west.

Sources & further reading

• The History of Rock County, Wisconsin (1879). Rockport, Wisconsin City and the platting of Janesville in 1837 (pp. 532-533); Henry F. Janes’s letter on the claim, the cabin, the ferry fight, Black Hawk and Amos Kendall, and his departure in 1839 (pp. 548-550); Humboldt County and the railroad boast (p. 550).
• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States (USGS Bulletin 197, 1902). Named for Henry F. Janes.
• Chicago & North Western place-names book (1908), p. 87. Named for Henry F. Janes, settled in 1836; Wisconsin City and Rockport, and the territorial legislation.
• GNIS feature 1567100 (U.S. Geological Survey). The Winnebago village of E-nee-poro-poro, “round rock.”
• Ho-Chunk Nation, “Wisconsin Winnebago fades into history as signing of the new constitution brings on The Ho Chunk Nation.” The nation’s own account of going back to the name Ho-Chunk under its 1994 constitution.