Beyond the understanding that the centre of the Capitol Park was to be the common corner of four sections of land which met near the middle of the isthmus, there had as yet been no thought of how this projected town in the woods should be laid out. A French half-breed, Olivier Armel, who had a temporary trading shanty on the tract, half brush and half canvas, was the only man whom the surveyor found when he arrived in a blinding snowstorm in February (1837) to set the stakes in this virgin wilderness for the future State House of Wisconsin. The streets of the town were laid out, so far as possible, upon the lines of the national capital: wide avenues radiating from the Capitol Park upon the points of the compass were bisected by other highways paralleling the shores of the two principal lakes. For names of the thoroughfares, the patriotic surveyor had recourse to the list of signatures to the federal Constitution, probably the only instance of a city's streets being exclusively named from this venerable body of lawgivers. The first dwelling in Madison was a log house built in April by one Eben Peck, for the entertainment of the mechanics who were expected out from Milwaukee to construct the State House. It was June 10th before the building commissioner and his thirty-six workmen put in an appearance, after a toilsome overland journey of ten days through rain and mud, with no roads, and unbridged rivers which had either to be forded or swam. On the 4th of July the conerstone was laid "with appropriate toasts and speeches" by a small knot of territorial officials. [Illustration THE FIRST EXECUTIVE RESIDENCE (STILL STANDING) IN USE BY GOVERNOR DOTY.] It was January, 1839, before the territorial Legislature could be accommodated at Madison; and even then the situation brought little comfort. Says a pioneer of those days: "With the session came crowds of people. The public houses were literally crammed--shakedowns were looked upon as a luxury, and lucky was the guest whose fortune it was to rest his weary limbs on a straw or hay mattress." The little village was charmingly situated in the primeval forest. One of Madison's early teachers thus wrote of the hamlet of his young manhood: "Those who only know of Madison now, have but a feeble conception of its wonderful and fascinating beauty at the beginning. In 1839 it had the look of a well-kept lawn, shaded by fine white-oak and burr-oak trees, with a fragrant fringe of red cedar all about the lake shores. There was then no underbrush and thicket such as sprung up soon, when the semi-annual fires ceased to do the duty of the rake and mower; but the eye had a stretch quite uninterrupted, except as the surface rose in beautiful green knolls on either lake. The lakes then lay in natural silver beauty, prettily framed in pebbly beach. For simple, quiet beauty, Madison in 1839 was unequalled by anything I remember."