The Frank W. Hoyt Park Historic District is located on the near west side of the city of Madison on a heavily wooded hilltop site. It contains one of Madison’s most significant and concentrated collections of Depression-era, 1930’s Rustic Style park buildings and other park structures.

The park consists of two different segments that were developed at different times in the nineteenth century and were then joined together in the twentieth. The earliest of the two is the 24-acre easternmost portion, which was privately developed as a stone quarry in the 1850s and subsequently purchased by the City of Madison in 1890 for its own use.

The other segment consists of a 14-acre parcel that is roughly bisected by a roadway known as Owen Parkway. This parcel was purchased in 1892 by University of Wisconsin Prof. Edward T. Owen, who had become enthralled with the spectacular view to the west that could be seen from the top of this drumlin. In order to access this view, Owen purchased the top of the hill and then had a carriage road built to and through his 14 acres, all of which he then donated to a newly formed private local parks organization for the use of the public. Not long after, this road was named Owen Parkway in his honor and the apex of this property soon became popularly known as Sunset Point because of the views.

By 1928, though, the City’s quarry was no longer in use and the city was growing steadily westward, so the Madison Common Council decided to combine the quarry property with the adjacent Owen Parkway property and turn these two heavily wooded parcels into a public park. City-funded work on the new project began in 1928 and by 1932, a park plan had been made and much of the land had been cleared.

The real development of the park took place between 1933 and 1936 when federal funding for park development purposes became available as part of federal efforts to alleviate unemployment during the Great Depression. In 1934, work crews funded by the Civil Works Administration (CWA) built a new stone shelter house, 15 new stone fireplaces, and new stone retaining walls and stairs at the Sunset Point lookout. A year later workers funded by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) built a new stone restroom building, a network of trails, and stone staircases to connect these trails.

By late 1936, the park, which by then had been named Frank W. Hoyt Park in honor of one of Madison’s great park development champions, was largely a reality and this park, with its many superb Rustic style resources, is intact and continues to be heavily used by the citizens of Madison.