Madison Central High School - Tychoberahn Yearbook (Madison, WI)

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 sg JN A NSW ER to this demand the school board authorized the purchase of a building in which the first preparatory classes for university had l een organized in 1856. In 1857 the transaction was completed, and the building became Madison’s first high school. The facilities it offered were hardly those of a country school today; but at that time, when educational standards were none too high in the frontier states among which Wisconsin might still be numbered, it seemed remarkable. The board fence that surrounded it, the ill-paved street with its crude gutters, the wooded hills which had yet to be cleared in the name of progress, all were characteristic of Madison then. Even the central portions of the city were undeveloped, and the present residential districts of East, South, and West Madison still were either occupied by farms or were studded with limber. But the city was beginning to expand, to take shape; and as the seat of the government and university of the state its future was assured. | Page Fifteen )

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|F FIND interwoven in the history of Madison the his-tory of Central High School. The two have grown side l v side. Yet the inception of neither hat! much promise. Madison's beginning was indeed humble. In the year I Hot) few eyes could have envisioned its five inhabitants, located as they were in the heart of the as yet undeveloped territory of Wisconsin, grown in number to 50,000. But the immigrants who assembled in the first territorial legislature at Belmont in Lafayette county had been charmed by the ideal beauty of its location on the narrow. wooded isthmus between Lake Mendota and Lake Monona, and they decided to locate there the capitol of what was to be the State of Wisconsin. So in 1857 the cornerstone of the building above, the first statehouse was laid. With the building of the capitol the population grew enormously. Finnaly, in 1856. Madison was incorporated as a city, and one of the first moves of the new municipal government was a consideration of the demand for improved educational facilities. 11330 [ Page Fourteen )

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(o? •i1 s 1 3 le cikY l,a(l progressed to such an extent that tlu need for a larger liigli school became evident. The site which Central High School now occupies was selected as likely, and work was immediately begun on a new building. This was but one of many public improvements which emphasized the growth of the city. The new school was larger and far better equipped than the old; a new water system was installed, streets were paved; industrial enterprises grew and prospered; the business district about the square expanded; new university buildings were erected and on the East West, ami South the city limits were continually extended. Madison was indeed entering into its own as capitol of the State of Wisconsin. ( Page Sixteen |