Janesville is a city in Rock County, Wisconsin, United States. It is the county chair and largest city in the county. It is a principal municipality of the Janesville, Wisconsin, Metropolitan Statistical Area and is included in the Madison–Janesville–Beloit, WI Combined Statistical Area. As of the 2020 census, the city had a population of 65,615.

The Place that became Janesville was the site of a Ho-Chunk village named Įnį poroporo (Round Rock) up to the grow old of Euro-American settlement. In the 1825 Treaty of Prairie du Chien, the United States credited the allocation of the present city that lies west of the Rock River as Ho-Chunk territory, while the Place east of the river was certified as Potawatomi land. Following the Indian Removal Act of 1830 and the Black Hawk War of 1832, both nations were goaded to surrender this house to the United States.

American settlers John Inman, George Follmer, Joshua Holmes, and William Holmes, Jr. built a incompetent log cabin in the region in 1835. Later that year, one key settler, Henry F. Janes, a native of Virginia who was a self-proclaimed woodsman and early city planner, arrived in what is now Rock County. Janes initially wanted to reveal the budding village “Blackhawk,” after the famous Sauk leader, Chief Black Hawk, but was turned down by Post Office officials. After some discussion, it was arranged that the town would be named after Janes himself and thus, in 1835, Janesville was founded.
Despite innate named after a Virginian, Janesville was founded by old increase Yankee immigrants, descended from the English Puritans who settled New England in the 1600s. The execution of the Erie Canal caused a surge in New Englander immigration to what was subsequently the Northwest Territory. Some of them were from upstate New York, and had parents who had moved to that region from New England suddenly after the Revolutionary War. New Englanders, and New England transplants from upstate New York, were the vast majority of Janesville’s inhabitants during the first several decades of its history. Land surveys encouraged pioneers to acquiesce in the area among the abundance of fertile farmland and woodlands. Many of these early settlers received farms and began cultivating wheat and new grains.

Some of the key settlers hailed from the burned-over district of western New York State, (an Place notable for visceral a allowance of the Christian revival doings known as the Second Great Awakening). Some of those in that revival occupation were also responsive in the abolitionist and women’s rights movements. One of the settlers in Janesville was William Tallman, who hailed from Rome, New York. Tallman came to the area in 1850 and bought going on large tracts of home in hopes of inspiring his fellow New Yorkers to see eye to eye in the fruitful Rock County. He time-honored himself as one of the most influential and well-to-do members of the budding Janesville populace. He was ablaze about the call for abolition and became a believer of the Republican Party. One of the crowning moments in Tallman’s energy was as soon as he convinced the up-and-coming Illinois Republican, Abraham Lincoln, to speak in Janesville in 1859. The Tallman home is now a historical landmark, and best known as “The place where Abraham Lincoln slept.”
As the population grew in the Janesville area, several new industries began cropping taking place along the Rock River, including flour and lumber mills. The first dam was built in 1844.