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is a city in Milwaukee County, Wisconsin, United States, and was incorporated on May 27, 1897. As of the 2006 census estimate, the city's population was 44,798. Wauwatosa is located immediately west of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and is a part of the Milwaukee metropolitan area. It is named after the Potawatomi word for firefly.
The lush Menomonee River Valley of the Wauwatosa area provided a key overland gateway between the rich glacial farmland of southeastern Wisconsin and the Port of Milwaukee. In 1835, Charles Hart became the first permanent white settler, followed by seventeen other families the same year. The following year a United States Road was built from Milwaukee through Wauwatosa, eventually reaching Madison.
The Town of Wauwatosa was created by act of the Wisconsin Territorial Legislature in 1840, and the town government was organized in 1842. The town's borders originally extended from Greenfield Avenue in the south to Hampton Avenue in the north, and from 27th Street in the east to the Waukesha County line in the west, encompassing sections of present-day Milwaukee and West Allis. Most of the town was farmland through the remainder of the nineteenth century.
In 1849 the Watertown Plank Road was constructed through Wauwatosa, mainly following the old Madison territorial road. In 1851 Wisconsin's first railroad (later becoming The Milwaukee Road) established Wauwatosa as its western terminus. The Village of Wauwatosa was incorporated from the central part of the Town of Wauwatosa in 1892, and was recharted as the City of Wauwatosa in 1897.
In the 1950s, the City of Wauwatosa more than doubled its size by annexing 8.5 square miles (22 km²) of land west of the Menomonee River from the Town of Wauwatosa, which became the home to several large cold storage and regional food distribution terminals. Industrial plants owned by firms including Harley-Davidson and Briggs & Stratton were also constructed.
In the past 40 years, western Wauwatosa has become an edge city with an important commercial and retail district built up along Milwaukee's beltline Highway 100 and anchored by the Mayfair Mall.
Wauwatosa received some national attention in 1992 when the Wauwatosa Common Council, threatened with a lawsuit, decided to remove a Christian cross from the City's seal adopted in 1957.