It's always a good time to celebrate our local culture - cheese, beer, and the Swiss yodeling and music that goes with it. But Saturday is a very special occasion. Our National Historic Cheesemaking Center that doubles as Green County's Welcome Center is hosting a real live cheesemaking demonstration. Several of our local master cheesemakers will make a wheel of Swiss cheese just as it was done during the early 20th Century.
Wisconsin is generally tagged with the "rust belt" label, with its negative connotations of economic decline. The western shore of Lake Michigan with Kenosha, Racine, Milwaukee, along with the Fox River Valley and Green Bay, is indeed part of the Midwestern manufacturing belt. Monroe is only 35 miles west of Janesville where the oldest operating General Motors assembly plant was closed a few years ago. Janesville - home of former U.S. Senator Russ Feingold and current House Speaker Paul Ryan of our neighboring First Congressional District - is featured in the recent book, "Janesville: An American Story," by Amy Goldstein.
Goldstein's book is a well-researched study of the evisceration of the American working class, and hardships wrought by plant closings such as that GM plant. But not withstanding our proximity to the storied city that typifies industrial change, in this neck of the woods we tend to think of ourselves as "agriculture-based." We produce stuff in Green County, like cheese and beer. Ours is doubtlessly the only rural county that is home to two major breweries in addition to our wonderful cheese factories with the greatest concentration of master cheesemakers in the nation.
This story has been retold countless times, but let's review some basics.
The first permanent European settlers to Monroe and Green County in the early 1800s were "Yankees" from New England. Wheat was the major agricultural crop.
In 1845, as Switzerland's Canton Glarus was going through hard times, the canton dispatched a group led by Nicolas Duerst and Fridolin Streiff to America to search for a site to which the canton's ambitious citizens could migrate in search of a better life, including the opportunity to own land. This early pioneering effort led to the present village of New Glarus.
While wheat remained for a time the major agricultural crop, early Swiss settlers brought dairy cows from Ohio to Green County. Farm wives started making cheese for home use. Clearly, Wisconsin's first cheesemakers were women who made efficient use of surplus milk for home use.
It was subsequent failure of the wheat crop through disease that ushered in an emerging dairy industry. Swiss immigrant Nicolas Gerber moved from New York to Wisconsin and started the first commercial cheese factory, making Limburger. As the hilly wooded lands of Green County with its lush pastures and flowing streams were ideally suited for dairy cattle, milk production and cheesemaking flourished.
During the last half of the 1800s, large numbers of immigrants from Switzerland's German-speaking cantons arrived in Green County and engaged in farming and cheesemaking. Most of our current residents with Swiss names, including this writer, are direct descendants of those late 19th- and early 20th-Century immigrants.
During the early days of cheesemaking, Green County was dotted with over 300 neighborhood factories. Factories had to be located such that milk could be hauled daily by horse and wagon. As with any economic enterprise, technology brings change. With the arrival of motor vehicles, milk could be hauled several miles daily. Many of the old neighborhood factories disappeared - as factories, that is. As you travel rural roads around here, the older, longish one-story residences that dot the countryside were once active neighborhood cheese factories. We now have 12 active cheese factories.
The farms on which so many of us around here grew up were combination dairy-hog farms. Whey, a byproduct of cheesemaking, is a nutritious feed for hogs. As farmers began to specialize - some quit milking cows, and others specialized in milking cows and quit raising hogs - it became a problem to dispose of the whey, then seen as a "waste product."
The real "waste" was not utilizing it. Belatedly, its valuable protein was recognized and put to good use. Bodybuilders and athletes now consume whey-based protein products as a healthy food supplement. Why resort to illegal and harmful steroids when a healthful dairy product is available?
Pipelines and bulk tanks further revolutionized milk production. But heck, that's nothing. The dairy farms around here with milking parlors now resemble large factory farms common to California and the Southwest. Advanced milking parlors are designed so that cows leisurely amble into the parlor to be milked by robot while enjoying a feed ration, individually computerized for each cow's needs and dining pleasure.
We hard-working farm kids using 1950s "advanced technology" of strapping on a Surge milker to cows would have dismissed as a nut case any dreamer that seriously suggested that during our lifetimes cows would, at their discretion, be milked by robot.
Just as milk production has changed, so has cheesemaking. It isn't just Swiss and Limburger, but more varieties than you can name. We still have the only working Limburger factory in the nation - the Chalet Factory north of town. Excellent Feta and Gruyere cheeses are favorites of our modern factories.
But it's Swiss cheese that made Green County famous. In Switzerland, it's called Emmentaler, after the Emme Valley in Canton Bern.
In 2010 the old Imobersteg farm factory, abandoned in 1917, was moved from its farm location to its present location at NHCC and restored to original style. On June 10, master cheesemakers will produce a wheel of Swiss cheese just as it was done a century ago. In the words of the late cheesemaker Johnny Bussman, it's to preserve "an era that was, but will never be again."
Don't miss the demonstration, along with Alphorns and music. If you play your cards right, you might even get to taste some whey.
- John Waelti of Monroe can be reached at jjwaelti1@tds.net. His column appears Fridays in The Monroe Times.
Wisconsin is generally tagged with the "rust belt" label, with its negative connotations of economic decline. The western shore of Lake Michigan with Kenosha, Racine, Milwaukee, along with the Fox River Valley and Green Bay, is indeed part of the Midwestern manufacturing belt. Monroe is only 35 miles west of Janesville where the oldest operating General Motors assembly plant was closed a few years ago. Janesville - home of former U.S. Senator Russ Feingold and current House Speaker Paul Ryan of our neighboring First Congressional District - is featured in the recent book, "Janesville: An American Story," by Amy Goldstein.
Goldstein's book is a well-researched study of the evisceration of the American working class, and hardships wrought by plant closings such as that GM plant. But not withstanding our proximity to the storied city that typifies industrial change, in this neck of the woods we tend to think of ourselves as "agriculture-based." We produce stuff in Green County, like cheese and beer. Ours is doubtlessly the only rural county that is home to two major breweries in addition to our wonderful cheese factories with the greatest concentration of master cheesemakers in the nation.
This story has been retold countless times, but let's review some basics.
The first permanent European settlers to Monroe and Green County in the early 1800s were "Yankees" from New England. Wheat was the major agricultural crop.
In 1845, as Switzerland's Canton Glarus was going through hard times, the canton dispatched a group led by Nicolas Duerst and Fridolin Streiff to America to search for a site to which the canton's ambitious citizens could migrate in search of a better life, including the opportunity to own land. This early pioneering effort led to the present village of New Glarus.
While wheat remained for a time the major agricultural crop, early Swiss settlers brought dairy cows from Ohio to Green County. Farm wives started making cheese for home use. Clearly, Wisconsin's first cheesemakers were women who made efficient use of surplus milk for home use.
It was subsequent failure of the wheat crop through disease that ushered in an emerging dairy industry. Swiss immigrant Nicolas Gerber moved from New York to Wisconsin and started the first commercial cheese factory, making Limburger. As the hilly wooded lands of Green County with its lush pastures and flowing streams were ideally suited for dairy cattle, milk production and cheesemaking flourished.
During the last half of the 1800s, large numbers of immigrants from Switzerland's German-speaking cantons arrived in Green County and engaged in farming and cheesemaking. Most of our current residents with Swiss names, including this writer, are direct descendants of those late 19th- and early 20th-Century immigrants.
During the early days of cheesemaking, Green County was dotted with over 300 neighborhood factories. Factories had to be located such that milk could be hauled daily by horse and wagon. As with any economic enterprise, technology brings change. With the arrival of motor vehicles, milk could be hauled several miles daily. Many of the old neighborhood factories disappeared - as factories, that is. As you travel rural roads around here, the older, longish one-story residences that dot the countryside were once active neighborhood cheese factories. We now have 12 active cheese factories.
The farms on which so many of us around here grew up were combination dairy-hog farms. Whey, a byproduct of cheesemaking, is a nutritious feed for hogs. As farmers began to specialize - some quit milking cows, and others specialized in milking cows and quit raising hogs - it became a problem to dispose of the whey, then seen as a "waste product."
The real "waste" was not utilizing it. Belatedly, its valuable protein was recognized and put to good use. Bodybuilders and athletes now consume whey-based protein products as a healthy food supplement. Why resort to illegal and harmful steroids when a healthful dairy product is available?
Pipelines and bulk tanks further revolutionized milk production. But heck, that's nothing. The dairy farms around here with milking parlors now resemble large factory farms common to California and the Southwest. Advanced milking parlors are designed so that cows leisurely amble into the parlor to be milked by robot while enjoying a feed ration, individually computerized for each cow's needs and dining pleasure.
We hard-working farm kids using 1950s "advanced technology" of strapping on a Surge milker to cows would have dismissed as a nut case any dreamer that seriously suggested that during our lifetimes cows would, at their discretion, be milked by robot.
Just as milk production has changed, so has cheesemaking. It isn't just Swiss and Limburger, but more varieties than you can name. We still have the only working Limburger factory in the nation - the Chalet Factory north of town. Excellent Feta and Gruyere cheeses are favorites of our modern factories.
But it's Swiss cheese that made Green County famous. In Switzerland, it's called Emmentaler, after the Emme Valley in Canton Bern.
In 2010 the old Imobersteg farm factory, abandoned in 1917, was moved from its farm location to its present location at NHCC and restored to original style. On June 10, master cheesemakers will produce a wheel of Swiss cheese just as it was done a century ago. In the words of the late cheesemaker Johnny Bussman, it's to preserve "an era that was, but will never be again."
Don't miss the demonstration, along with Alphorns and music. If you play your cards right, you might even get to taste some whey.
- John Waelti of Monroe can be reached at jjwaelti1@tds.net. His column appears Fridays in The Monroe Times.
