Settlers Arrive: the lakes are named, then renamed.
The first European settlers arrived to the Yarhara lakes region around 1800. At the same time, the area was home to the Winnebago Nation. (Winnebago tribes continued to camp near the lakes into the 1940s.) The area became known as the Four Lakes area. Government surveyors simply named the lakes one through four as they moved north from the Illinois border. For a period, settlers referred to Laka Monona simply as the "third lake."

Monona Bay remained a small natural bay, partly surrounded by wetland for most of the 1800s. The 1834 surveyor's field notes for the section line running north, starting from about a half mile south of Olin and Wingra Creek Parkway, to the Bay (south triangle) describe the area as:

"Land except marsh rolling and 2nd rate. Timber (is) Black, White and Burr Oak. Undergrowth oak and grass. Growth in marsh (is) grass."

However, the development of Madison would eventually change that. Madison became the capital of the Wisconsin territory in 1833. Soon after that, Wisconsin became a state (1848). Development began, and the Tenney Locks were constructed in 1849 to control water levels.

In 1854, the four lakes were renamed. The lakes, which previously had Winnebago names, were given pleasant-sounding Chippewa names to attract development, at the request of then-governor Leonard Farwell. The Winnebago had called Lake Monona "Tchee-ho-bo-kee-xa-te-la." or "Teepee Lake."

The local ice-harvesting industry
By the 1860s, residents began taking advantage of frozen Lake Monona and harvested ice for commercial use. Ice harvested in winter on Lake Monona was shipped south and used in iced drinks; that's how clean Lake Monona was in 1866. The railroad that cuts Monona Bay off from Lake Monona - built in 1854 - helped spur growth of the ice industry. For more than a decade, Madison's commercial ice industry boomed. Eventually, the dumping or raw sewage put a stop to that. In 1886, the City Council passed a law banning the cutting of ice closer than 1500 feet from sewer outfalls.

Indoor plumbing and the decline in water quality
In1866, city officials removed the Capitol lawn outhouse and replaced it with an indoor water closet. This marked the beginning of the end of Lake Monona's health. By the mid-1880s, hundreds of residents would have indoor plumbing. To accommodate them, the city built a sewer system but couldn't afford a processing plant. The raw sewage was simply dumped into Lake Monona. A long, intense public debate followed about whether dumping raw sewage in the lake would affect its water quality.

By 1895, the debate was over. It was clear that dumping sewage into Lake Monona was deteriorating the lake. The stench became unbearable on hot summer days. Weeds and algae flourished, and the city commissioned what was perhaps the world's first lake weed-cutting machine. People stopped swimming in Lake Monona and stopped eating its fish. Building a sewage processing plant became the city's top priority, but it would be decades before the dumping of sewage (raw and partially treated) would end.

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