A bit of Switzerland in Wisconsin
MY wife and I hitched our bikes to the rack at the trailside picnic shelter and unloaded our lunch: landjäger and mettwurst sausages; blocks of aged Cheddar and Swiss cheese; a cookie assemblage, including pfeffernusse and nut horns; and two cold bottles of lager.It was a Swiss picnic fit for an alpine meadow, but we were in the Midwest, in the small Wisconsin town of New Glarus (population 2,000), a k a “America’s Little Switzerland.” Amy and I came here, to the rolling pastoral dairy land about 25 miles southwest of Madison, for a European-like getaway: visiting a country village; walking and biking everywhere; feasting on breads, sausages and cheese made the Old World way; and drinking exceptional beer.The original Swiss immigrants came to Wisconsin seeking food, too. In the mid 19th century, the canton of Glarus in central Switzerland, was suffering through a famine. The canton government had a solution: If it couldn’t feed all of its people, it would send some to the New World. In 1845, two Swiss scouts, Nicholas Duerst and Fridolin Streiff, searched and finally found rich arable land and abundant forests in the Wisconsin Territory, where they purchased 1,200 acres.The next summer, 118 immigrants arrived, and within a decade, New Glarus was a booming frontier town. The Crimean War drove up the price of wheat, and the colonists enjoyed prosperity, plenty of food and enough money to send $1,250 back to Switzerland in 1861 when a fire ravaged the city of Glarus. Successive waves of Glarners emigrated to the colony, and they kept coming well into the 20th century.Today Swiss roots still run deep in New Glarus. Downtown — a small district of Swiss restaurants, artisan food shops and European gift stores — is filled with chalet-style buildings. Streets have names like Bahnhoff Strasse and Rüti Strasse, and on one corner, a stone sculpture of the staff of St. Fridolin — the patron saint of Glarus — is displayed, a 1995 gift to the town from Glarners in Switzerland.
