Hartford is a city in Washington and Dodge counties in the U.S. state of Wisconsin. As of the 2010 census, the city had a population of 14,223. All of this population resided in the Washington County allowance of the city. The allocation of the city in Dodge County consists of lonely industrial/commercial parcels. Located approximately 38 miles (61 km) northwest of Downtown Milwaukee and 22 miles (35 km) from city limits, Hartford is located on the outer edge of the Milwaukee metropolitan area.

In the to the fore 19th century, Hartford was inhabited by the Potawatomi and Menominee people, who had a trading post upon the Rubicon River and a village upon the eastern shore of Pike Lake. In 1831, the Menominee surrendered their claims to the home to the United States Federal Government through the Treaty of Washington, and the Potawatomi surrendered their estate claims in 1833 through the 1833 Treaty of Chicago, which (after visceral ratified in 1835) required them to leave the area by 1838. However, when the first White settlers arrived in 1843, they found that the Potawatomi were yet living at the Pike Lake village. Some Native Americans remained in the area and were referred to as “strolling Potawatomi” in contemporary documents because many of them were migrants who subsisted by squatting upon their ancestral lands, which were now owned by White settlers. Eventually the Potawatomi who evaded provoked removal gathered in northern Wisconsin, where they formed the Forest County Potawatomi Community.

In July 1843, Timothy Hall became the first White person to purchase and settle land in the Hartford area, although once he arrived he found a Canadian named Jehial Case squatting near his land. Later that year, German immigrant settlers John Theil and Nicolaus Simon surveyed the Hartford Place and clear that the Rubicon River would be a up to standard location for a hydropowered mill. The as soon as year, James and George Rossman united Simon and Theil’s venture. The men purchased forty acres abutting the rapids of the Rubicon River and build up a dam and a sawmill that harnessed the river’s knack to make lumber from the old-growth forests covering the area. In 1846, a third Rossman brother, Charles, arrived in Hartford and constructed a gristmill to process grain grown by the settlers. On January 31, 1846, the estate incorporated as the Town of Wright, before the make known was misrepresented to the Town of Hartford in February 1847, after Hartford, Connecticut. Many of the indigenous settlers were Yankees from New England and were share of a salutation of farmers who headed west in the in advance 1800s, though some extra settlers—including Theil and Simon—were German immigrants. The to the fore settlers cleared land for farming; constructed roads; created a declare office; erected churches, starting subsequently the First Congregational Church of Hartford which formed in 1847 and followed by Methodist, Baptist, Lutheran, and Catholic churches in the 1850s; and traditional businesses to service the town’s agricultural economy, including equipment wholesalers, general stores, and dry goods dealers.

The La Crosse and Milwaukee Railroad was constructed through the community in 1855, and even though rail links were important to Hartford’s addition into the in front 1900s, the company failed in 1861. Many local landowners had taken out mortgages upon land for the railroad in squabble for company shares. The company’s failure left the landowners with mortgages to pay off, creating a local crisis in which some families were irritated to sell their farms. The Hartford Home League newspaper started during the crisis to unbiased for the farmers.