Benton, WI

Benton is a Lafayette County village in Wisconsin’s Driftless Area, near the Illinois line and surrounded by farm fields. The 2020 census counted 946 residents. The village center carries the old lead-mining and commercial history of the Galena River country, while state and county roads connect it with Cuba City, Hazel Green, and the surrounding farms. Benton’s village government and local businesses sit inside a wider town of the same name, so the place name covers two related but separate units.

Miners from Galena came through the area in the 1820s, and Andrew Murphy became one of Benton’s first permanent settlers in 1827. The village was laid out in 1844 and took the name Benton in 1845, honoring Missouri senator Thomas Hart Benton. Father Samuel Mazzuchelli later shaped local religious history through St. Patrick Catholic Church, where he is buried. Benton still carries the marks of that early sequence: mineral wealth, farm roads, village streets, and the larger Driftless landscape around them.