Developed from 1900 to 1911 along the Yahara River, Tenney Park and its parkway lead toward Lake Mendota. Designed by Ossian Cole Simonds — called the father of Prairie School landscape architecture — the parkway runs parallel with the Yahara and leads you to the park where the river meets Lake Mendota. In 1999 this park and parkway were successfully nominated and listed on the State and the National Register of Historic Places.
Listen to the layers of this place: before White settlement the Four Lakes region was home to Native Americans and the Yahara meandered from Lake Mendota through marsh and swamps across the isthmus to Lake Monona. In 1849 Leonard J. Farwell dammed the Yahara where it flows out of Lake Mendota and in 1850–1851 he built a five-story flour mill on the west bank. The river, once called Catfish Creek, had apparently been straightened by 1885.
Madison itself was platted in 1836 and grew after it was chosen as the state capital and site of the University of Wisconsin in 1848; rail arrived in the 1870s and manufacturing expanded in the 1880s. Ossian Cole Simonds, father of Prairie School landscape architecture, laid out these grounds.