Wisconsin Historical Society
With “Black Bridge” spanning the Yahara River in the background, members of the Four Lakes Yacht Club prepare to launch in 1953.
Monona is both ancient and new. Settled in prehistory, it was incorporated only 79 years ago.
Dorothy Browne Haines is herself part of that history. “Yes, now I am,” she says, laughing. A former journalist, the 95-year-old historian and author co-wrote Monona in the Making: History of the City of Pride, 1938-1975 with Ann Waidelich and Robert Bean, published in 1999.
Haines moved to Monona in 1968, but she’d already visited many times when the area was still a resort-like gathering of cabins. “We’d come out and spend our weekends here, starting in the 1930s,” she recalls. Her family camped at first, and then built a boathouse near today’s Wyldhaven Park. “We’d come out and stay the weekend,” she recalls, borrowing fresh water from neighbors and sleeping in the boathouse.
She notes that Monona’s original inhabitants were Native Americans, mound builders. Monona is dotted with mounds, such as the effigy of a panther in Frost Woods, created some 1,500 years ago (giving rise to Monona’s street name “Panther Trail”). Some of its creators were perhaps discovered in 1948, when four skeletons were found in a burial mound during excavation of Midwood Avenue. One skull bore a white clay mask, indicating a person of great importance.
Wisconsin Historical Society
Living in wigwams similar to this, the Ho-Chunk maintained a presence in the area until the 1930s.
Closer to the present day, the Ho-Chunk lived along the south side of Lake Monona. Their campgrounds extended from Paunack Marsh to Winnequah Point, the 5600 block of Tonyawatha Trail. “Tonyawatha” supposedly translated as healing waters; the many Indian trails served as entry points for white explorers.
White settlement in the Winnequah Point area began when it was part of the town of Blooming Grove. Several resorts sprang up, reached by Madison steamboats that operated from the foot of South Carroll Street. The most notable was Tonyawatha Spring, a spa-like hotel with a band pavilion, a bowling and billiards retreat, and a bottling works, to capture the alleged curative power of the springs. Opened in 1879, Tonyawatha entertained tourists from as far away as Chicago, St. Louis and Kansas City. The resort took up the 4300 through 4500 blocks of today’s Winnequah Road. It was destroyed by fire in 1895.
Wisconsin Historical Society
The Tonyawatha Spring Hotel, circa 1885, is the grand example of Monona’s past as a summer resort.
The resort spirit persisted, however. “It was a summer place,” says Waidelich, Haines’ co-author of Monona in the Making and historian of Madison’s east side. “People just had little summer houses, and there were quite a few farms— what we call market garden farms; strawberries and tomatoes and so on, selling into Madison. There was the rural feeling of not wanting to be absorbed by Madison.”
One of the farms belonged to Frank Allis, son of the founder of the Allis-Chalmers agricultural machinery company. His magnificent 1888 manor house and estate survive as the San Damiano Friary, 4123 Monona Drive.
Wisconsin Historical Society
The Frank Allis house on the shore of Lake Monona is now the San Damiano Friary.
The area’s pastoral flavor continued into the first decades of the 20th century. Mail service to the area began in 1907 — by boat, and only during the summer. From 1913 to 1924 an interurban trolley line ran from Fair Oaks and Atwood Avenues, along Monona Drive to today’s Winnequah Road.
Monona’s birth was utilitarian. “Residents didn’t like the services that the township of Blooming Grove was providing,” says Waidelich. “So there was the debate about, ‘Should we incorporate ourselves, or should we annex into Madison?’ They finally decided to incorporate in 1938.”
In part, founding the Village of Monona was also a response to the earlier effects of Prohibition. The area had long become a favorite of “entertainment” establishments offering bootleg alcohol and prostitution.
“Blooming Grove has a Town Chairman who was very capable, but he was a radical,” merchant Ernie Ferchland later recalled in City of Monona: Its Landmarks and Heritage.
Residents demanded law enforcement. Ferchland’s bucolic grocery, Ernie’s Trading Post, already served as a meeting place. (The building today is Monona Motors, 4500 Winnequah Road.) It was there that “secession” was plotted. The break with Blooming Grove officially came Aug. 29, 1938. “Tonyawatha” and “Winnequah” were considered as the new community’s name. However, spelling difficulties were also considered. As a result, “Monona” prevailed. A namesake newspaper was quickly founded, The Monona Messenger.
Development in Monona was problematic. Towns usually coalesce around business areas. Monona, a loose collection of farmhouses and cabins, had none. Worse, despite its new status as a village, the community remained . . . odiferous. It boasted 155 septic tanks and 149 “outdoor privies” in 1939, according to Monona in the Making. Garbage was collected by a hog farmer who was paid $5 a month, total. He warned his clientele not to include tin cans or glass, lest his livestock recyclers come to harm.
Over time, Monona Drive — then simply Highway 51 — benefited from the rising car culture. A motel, a supermarket, kitchenettes and a drive-in were among the earliest to gamble on the nascent commercial strip. As the population grew, the City of Monona was incorporated in 1969.
David Michael Miller
The Dean House typifies the rural farmhouses once found along Monona Drive.
More of Monona’s history can be seen in the historic Nathaniel Dean home. Dean, an early settler of Madison, first operated a dry goods store just off the Capitol Square. In the 1840s he turned to land speculation, and in 1856 built a vaguely Italianate house and founded his Blooming Grove dairy farm, producing wheat, corn, barley, and the milk of 93 cows — a very large operation for the time.
“One of the reasons that Historic Blooming Grove was founded was to save a remnant of those rural farmhouses that used to be along Monona Drive. There were several others that got torn down for development in the 1970s,” says Waidelich, who serves as museum curator for the Dean House. Preserved in its Victorian condition, “It is, in a sense, the only house museum in Madison.”
The Dean House hosts tours and an annual summer Back Porch concert series. For more information, see bloominggrovehistory.org.
