History:

 Settlers first began moving into the area around Mazomanie in the 1840s. Many of these first pioneers were members of the British Temperance Emigration Society, popular in the Yorkshire and Lancashire regions of England. Dover, now a ghost town, was the first village they founded. This site was gradually abandoned after the arrival of the railroad.

Mazomanie was named by Edward Brodhead, a superintendent of the Milwaukee and Mississippi Railroad, which recorded the original plat of the village in 1855. The village was named after an Indian chief whose name, when translated, means "Iron that Walks". Prior to the coming of the railroad the area around the village was sparsely settled. By the time the first train arrived on June 7, 1856, Mazomanie contained over eighty buildings. Twenty years later it was the second largest city in Dane County with a population numbering over 1,100. It was large enough to attract the Ringling Brothers Classic and Comic Concert Company from nearby Baraboo for their first public performance in 1882.