Edgerton is a city in Rock County and partly in Dane County in the U.S. state of Wisconsin. The population was 5,945 at the 2020 census. Of this, 5,799 were in Rock County, and 146 were in Dane County. Known locally as “Tobacco City U.S.A.,” because of the importance of tobacco growing in the region, Edgerton continues to be a center for the declining tobacco industry in the area.

Originally called Fulton Station, Edgerton was named after a 19th-century businessman, Elisha W. Edgerton, or his brother Benjamin Hyde Edgerton, a civil engineer.

In the late 19th and yet to be 20th centuries, Edgerton was the middle of the tobacco industry in southern Wisconsin. At one time, there were as many as 52 tobacco warehouses dotting the streets of the city. Queen Anne style mansions along Edgerton’s Washington Street testify to the profusion and stress some merchants with had. The 1890s Carlton Hotel, once located upon Henry Street, also later served as an new reminder of the tobacco industry’s influence. Although built by a brewing firm, the hotel (which burned to the auditorium in the 1990s) was frequented by tobacco buyers and sellers.

In 1886, Catholic parents in Edgerton protested the reading of the King James Bible in the village schools because they considered the Douay financial credit the truthful translation. The teacher board argued that Catholic kids could ignore the Bible readings or sit in the cloakroom even though the stop of the children listened to the reading of a Protestant tally of the Bible. Because the intellectual board refused to amend its policy, several families brought suit upon the grounds that the schools’ practice conflicted afterward the Wisconsin Constitution, which forbade sectarian guidance in the public schools.