[7] The location of Wisconsin's capital had been contentious, and the lead promoter of Madison, Judge James Doty, had gained allies and secured their ongoing motivation by selling them wild parcels around the proposed city.

That general configuration was apparently laid out by Milwaukee architect John F. Rague, and major elements remain to this day.

[3] For the first four years it was the only building on campus, so as well as living accommodations for 50 to 65 students, it contained lecture rooms, labs, a library and a chapel.

"The $20,000 cost of [South Hall] so crippled the University at the time that the purchase of books and apparatus had to be temporarily discontinued and the curriculum limited.

"[3] Most of the university faculty moved into South Hall with their families, paying roughly $3 per week per person for room and board.

[9] When many male students left for the Civil War, women were allowed in to keep the university afloat, and many of them lodged in South Hall starting in 1864.

The building was designed by Indianapolis architect William Tinsley in Italian Renaissance Revival style, and initially looked as shown in the 1885 drawing - quite different from today - smaller, with the center topped with a tall dome and a semi-circular colonnade facing the capitol.

Henry C. Koch of Milwaukee designed a four-story U-shaped building clad in Madison sandstone and styled Italianate, located where the new Science Hall now stands.

It housed labs and shops in the first floor/basement, chemistry and physics on the second floor, civil engineering and geology on the third, and natural history on the fourth, with an art gallery at the front.

[16] While the 1877 Science Hall still existed, leaders felt the university's greatest need was a space large enough for the whole student body to assemble.

University President Bascom engaged Madison architect David R. Jones, who designed a dramatic building with a large square corner clock tower, with walls of Madison sandstone (quarried at what is now Hoyt Park) trimmed with darker Superior brownstone, with corner buttresses and pinnacles, and with gently-pointed windows filled with stained glass created by George A. Misch of Chicago.

The hall's "good acoustics and pleasant setting made it ideal for the frequent literary society debates and free lectures series, both well attended by Madison residents.

Over the years, the auditorium has hosted Governor Robert La Follette, John F. Kennedy, Frank Lloyd Wright, the introduction of On, Wisconsin!

All construction bids came in higher than the regents wanted, so they appointed Allan Conover, one of the university's own professors of civil engineering, as general contractor.

[21] Professor Conover changed the design to reduce risk of another fire, replacing Koch's "slow-burning" wood framework and load-bearing walls with a steel skeleton and hollow clay tile.

Before there was an elevator, one of the rear towers housed a winch which lifted cadavers to the third floor anatomy labs, on their way to the attic for dissections.

He was "the first in the nation to apply microscopic lithology to an extensive study of crystalline rocks, and to use those results in the formulation of geologic principles."

[23] Just up the hill from Science Hall, the low-slung building with the big chimney was built in 1887 to house the university's central heating plant.

[25] Funded by the National Youth Administration, WHA hired students to decorate the lobby with art showing old means of communication: the copies of petroglyphs from around Wisconsin, the carved Indian drums in the light fixtures by John Gallagher, and the mural showing the early days of radio at Madison by John Stella.

[29] Meanwhile, some in the state legislature wanted to construct an armory in Madison to be ready in case of civil disturbances like the Haymarket Riot in Chicago less than ten years earlier.

[30] Allan Conover and Lew Porter designed a fortress-like structure with turrets and towers with corbels and battlements, in red brick trimmed with sandstone.

[31] The first floor initially held the commandant's office, the artillery drill room, bowling alleys and a swimming pool.

[33] Milwaukee architects Ferry & Clas designed the new building in Neoclassical style, with a broad Ionic colonnaded portico, and exterior of Bedford limestone.

State architect Arthur Peabody and Jarvis Hunt of Chicago designed a 5-story Neoclassical-styled structure behind Bascom and South Hall.

Wisconsin Alumni Magazine described entering from the Bascom mall side and seeing: ...biological specimens of general interest which fills most of the ground floor of the main building.

Police didn't intervene and things deteriorated until on May 20 a group of 200 union supporters attacked Pfeffer's workers, beating them and throwing some in the lake.

Arthur Peabody had designed a 4-story Italian Renaissance Revival structure with walls of Bedford limestone and a green tile roof.

The Wisconsin Union Theater wing was added in 1938, designed in Moderne style by Michael Hare and Paul Cret.

Subsequent classes pitched in on the fund-raising, and by the 1930s had enough money to proceed, but state architect Arthur Peabody didn't favor rebuilding the dome on Bascom, for both engineering and aesthetic reasons.

In 1959 the woods was involved in a controversy when the UW decided to take a bite out of it for the Sociology-Anthropology-Economics Building - a controversy that roused protest from various quarters, including Aldo Leopold's widow and Frank Lloyd Wright, who wrote of the regents' plan: ...This determination to cut into the fine remaining forest for some expedient building is going to prove to subsequent generations that 'regentry' need be neither scholar nor gentleman...