Hartford is a city in Dodge and Washington Counties in the U.S. state of Wisconsin. As of the 2009 census, the city had a population of 22,174. In the same year that Charles Dickens first published "A Christmas Carol" (1843), John Thiel and Nicolas Simon were the first to survey the area that became Hartford.
A year later, they returned with James and Charles Rossman to build a dam across the Rubicon River. They then built a sawmill by harnessing the river's flow to make lumber for the growing area. Then, the railroad came through in 1855 linking Chicago, Milwaukee, La Crosse and Minneapolis in the early 1900s.
