5 files on the desk from Madison, Wisconsin. 5 carry a net-worth figure.
Profile · Madison, Wisconsin
Conservationist and Almanac author; Madison residence 1924–1948 (Shack is near Baraboo, not the home address)
$640
Aldo Leopold was the Madison professor whose land ethic, distilled in A Sand County Almanac, taught Americans to judge a thing by whether it preserves the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. The Shack near Baraboo was the weekend lab; Madison was the life.
He transferred to Madison in 1924 to help run the U.S. Forest Products Laboratory, the federal wood-research center, and settled into a Craftsman on Van Hise Avenue. That same year he helped designate the Gila as the first Forest Service wilderness. In 1933 the University of Wisconsin created the country’s first chair of game management and gave it to him; he had already written the textbook. In 1934 he pushed Coon Valley as the first U.S. soil-conservation demonstration area. In 1935 the family bought a worn-out farm on the Wisconsin River—usually cited as eighty acres at purchase, later expanded—and converted a chicken coop into “the Shack.” Weekends, they planted pines.
As a young Burlington, Iowa, boy he had appropriated the family opera glasses for birding; as a Forest Service man in the Southwest he had once pumped lead into wolves and lived long enough to watch the green fire die in a she-wolf’s eyes and to regret it. Oxford University Press accepted the Almanac manuscript on April 14, 1948. A week later, on April 21, he died of a heart attack while helping a neighbor beat back a grass fire. The book appeared in 1949 and has sold some two million copies. The house on Van Hise is still a house. The Shack is a National Historic Landmark.
Profile · Madison, Wisconsin
SNL/film comedian from Madison / Maple Bluff (not cousin Jim Farley, Ford CEO)
$6 million
Christopher Crosby Farley was the Madison-raised Saturday Night Live and film comic whose physical abandon made Matt Foley a national catchphrase. He was dead at thirty-three; Madison buried him a few miles from the church where the real Matt Foley said the Mass.
He was born in Madison on February 15, 1964, the third of five children in an Irish Catholic house across from Lake Mendota in Maple Bluff. He wore No. 59 for the Edgewood Crusaders in 1981; teammates remembered the coach impressions on the bus more than the tackles. After Marquette he came home to work for his father at Scotch Oil, the family paving company. He could not spell asphalt. Clients loved him anyway. He did not love the work. Stand-up at the Comedy Cellar in 1985 froze him so completely he stopped going. Then he stumbled into the Ark, a ninety-nine-seat theater carved from a Brinks garage on North Bassett Street, and found the thing he was built for: other people.
Within months he was inventing a motivational speaker who had not yet moved into a van down by the river, handing out two-for-one coupons on State Street, and flashing plumber’s butt when a scene went cold. Chicago, Second City, and Saturday Night Live arrived so fast that Lorne Michaels hired him without an audition. An early Matt Foley voice was already on the Ark stage in 1987; the squat came from Edgewood football coaches and from his father when angry. At Our Lady Queen of Peace, the funeral priest was Rev. Matt Foley, a Marquette rugby friend whose name Farley had borrowed. He is buried at Resurrection Cemetery.
Profile · Madison, Wisconsin
1980 Olympic speedskating champion from Madison / Shorewood Hills (not sister Beth Heiden)
$20,000
Eric Arthur Heiden is the Madison-born speedskater who, in nine days at the 1980 Lake Placid Olympics, won every men’s long-track event on the program—five individual golds—and then walked away from the endorsement machine to become an orthopedic surgeon.
He was born in Madison on June 14, 1958, and raised in Shorewood Hills, the village wrapped by the isthmus. His father was a surgeon; his sister Beth could also skate past anyone. They trained on Vilas Park and Shorewood rinks, and he graduated from Madison West High School in 1976. The village later put his name on a warming hut, the Heiden Haus, at the elementary-school rink so kids could come in from the ice the way he and Beth had.
At Lake Placid he set Olympic records in all five distances and a world record in the 10,000 meters (14:28.13), after a bad night’s sleep following the Miracle on Ice and a breakfast of grabbed bread. He blacked out the Descente logo when the company would not sponsor him, rode the Tour de France with 7-Eleven until a concussion ended that chapter, and became an orthopedic surgeon like his father. Park City has him now. Madison still has the warming house.
Profile · Madison, Wisconsin
American Girl founder; Madison origin story (later HQ in Middleton); not to be confused as a Middleton-only name
$410 million
Pleasant Williams Thiele Rowland founded American Girl in a broken-down downtown Madison warehouse in 1986 and sold it to Mattel for $700 million in 1998. She called the mix of play and history chocolate cake with vitamins. Madison is the origin story; later headquarters sat ten minutes west in Middleton.
She was forty-five, a former second-grade teacher with textbook royalties in the bank, hunting Christmas dolls for two nieces and finding only Barbie and Cabbage Patch. A year earlier she had sat on a bench in Colonial Williamsburg and wondered whether history could be mailed to kids who would never get there. She bet nearly all of the $1.2 million she had earned writing reading programs, printed half a million catalogs against advice to print 100,000, and waited for the phones while packers wore mittens because the heat failed. Between September and December they sold $1.7 million; year two brought $7.6 million. Lands’ End had told her customers would not pay more than forty dollars for a doll; she priced them at eighty and sold them only by catalog.
She said she had been the company’s steward, never its owner. The money rebuilt downtown Madison with her husband, printer-turned-philanthropist Jerry Frautschi—including the $205 million that built Overture Center, a gift he refused to put his name on. He died in January 2026. She remains in Madison.
Profile · Madison, Wisconsin
Fighting Bob, Wisconsin Progressive governor and senator; born Primrose, Dane County (not Madison); father of Robert M. La Follette Jr.
$7,500
Robert Marion La Follette Sr.—Fighting Bob—was Wisconsin’s Progressive governor and U.S. senator, the force behind direct primaries, railroad taxes, and the Wisconsin Idea of professors writing the laws. Madison was not his birthplace; it was the adult political stage, the Maple Bluff house, and the Forest Hill grave.
He was born on a Primrose farm in Dane County on June 14, 1855, lost his father before he could remember him, and arrived in Madison as a teenager with a gift for talking. At the University of Wisconsin he was a mediocre student, a vegetarian, the owner of the campus paper, and the winner of a statewide oratory contest with a speech on Iago. He financed college in part by buying and running the student newspaper, the University Press. The conversion came in 1891, when lumber-and-railroad boss Philetus Sawyer allegedly offered him money to lean on a judge who happened to be his brother-in-law. He said no, told the state, and spent a decade as a Republican heretic.
He served as Dane County district attorney, then governor, then senator. In 1905 he moved to a then-sixty-acre Maple Bluff farm at 733 Lakewood Boulevard—the same year the legislature sent him to the Senate; he delayed taking the seat to finish the governorship. In 1924 he ran for president as a Progressive, took Wisconsin, and pulled nearly five million votes. He died in Washington the next June and came home to Forest Hill. The Maple Bluff house is a National Historic Landmark. In 1957 the U.S. Senate voted him one of its five most outstanding members; Wisconsin’s statue in the National Statuary Hall is his.