Burlington is a city in Racine and Walworth counties in the U.S. state of Wisconsin, with the majority of the city located in Racine County. The population of the city was 11,047 as of the 2020 census.

Prior to the dawn of Europeans in the area, Native American mounds were constructed near the present location of Burlington. For example, around 1830, a small Potawatomi village stood in what is now the Town of Burlington, though it wasn’t larger than the present-day city.

The earliest positive European presence in what is now Burlington was in the slip of 1799, when a bureau of French explorers and missionaries led by Francis Morgan de Vereceones made a portage from the Root River to the Fox River, reaching the Fox at nearly Burlington’s present location.

The first European settlers in Burlington were Moses Smith (the son of a Revolutionary War veteran) and William Whiting. Smith and Whiting had been in the Place previously, making a so-called “jackknife claim” to the land (carving their names and the date on trees in the vicinity) on December 15, 1835. The men next left the encampment and returned considering Lemuel Smith (Moses’ brother) as skillfully as Benjamin Perce, another devotee of the group. The four men searched for arable land and built a cabin upon the east side of the Fox River (on what is now Wehmhoff-Jucker Park.) Other settlers arrived in the spring and summer of 1836, mostly from New England; they named their agreement Foxville. That year, the residents of Foxville unanimously approved to tweak their settlement’s reveal to “Burlington” after the city Burlington, Vermont; the Foxville name continued to be used, however, until that publicize was officially changed on July 15, 1839.