On the first Sunday in August, on a wooded valley just east of town, the alphorn answers itself off the green Wisconsin hills. Down on First Street the bakery is pulling bratzeli and nut horns from the oven. Out on Highway 69 a brewery that does not sell beer outside Wisconsin is shipping forty-five thousand barrels of Spotted Cow a year.
This is New Glarus, the village in southern Wisconsin that the Swiss founded one summer afternoon in 1845, and that the Swiss, in some quiet stubborn way, never quite stopped running.
They call it America’s Little Switzerland, and for once the nickname holds up. About two thirds of the village still claim Swiss ancestry. The Wilhelm Tell play has been performed on the hillside since 1938. The cheese factories that anchored Green County’s dairy economy began here, with men from Canton Bern who brought the trade across.
New Glarus, The Place
New Glarus sits in Green County, in the rolling drift country of southern Wisconsin, about thirty miles southwest of Madison. The land is hilly, wooded, deeply green in summer, dairy country in every direction. The settlers chose it because it reminded them of home, which is a sentimental way of saying it had slopes for grazing cattle and the right kind of grass.
The village itself is small: about 2,260 residents at the 2020 census, with the most recent state estimates putting it just over 2,360. The main streets are 1st Street and 2nd Street, lined with shopfronts done up in carved Bernese woodwork, painted shutters, geranium boxes, and the occasional half-timbered facade. It looks like a film set. It is not a film set.
How New Glarus Became Swiss
Before the Swiss
Green County in 1845 was thinly settled frontier. Wisconsin had only entered the Union the previous decade, and the southern counties were a patchwork of woodland and prairie just beginning to be cleared by Yankee and German farmers moving west from New York and Pennsylvania. Lead miners worked the country to the southwest around Mineral Point. The land that became New Glarus was timber and rough pasture, available for a dollar twenty-five an acre.
No European community had taken root on the specific hillsides north of the Little Sugar River where the village would rise. When Niklaus Durst and Fridolin Streiff finally chose the site in the summer of 1845, they were laying a Swiss settlement onto more or less open ground.
The Swiss Arrive
The story begins in Canton Glarus in the early 1840s. The cantonal textile industry, which spun and printed cotton in the alpine valleys, was collapsing under competition from English mills. Crops failed. Families went hungry. The cantonal authorities, looking at the arithmetic of too many workers and not enough work, decided that organised emigration was the answer.
In 1844 they chartered the Glarner Auswanderungsgesellschaft, the Glarus Emigration Society. The society offered loans for passage and land, and in March 1845 it dispatched two men to America to find a place: Judge Niklaus Durst, a magistrate from Matt, and Fridolin Streiff, a blacksmith. They carried fifteen hundred florins, roughly six hundred dollars, and instructions to scout Pennsylvania and the Midwest for a suitable colony.
Durst and Streiff travelled through Pennsylvania, Michigan, Illinois, Iowa, and finally into Wisconsin. On July 17, 1845, they signed for 1,200 acres of timber and farmland in Green County at one dollar twenty-five an acre. Then they waited.
The emigrants were already on the water. On April 16, 1845, 193 Glarners had sailed from Le Havre, more than fifty above the society’s budgeted number, because emigration fever had taken hold and families would not be left behind. The crossing was hard. Three died on the way.
The survivors travelled by ship to Baltimore, then by canal and steamboat to St. Louis, then north by riverboat and on foot through Galena into the Wisconsin hills, looking for two men they had never seen on a piece of land they had never been told the location of. By a kind of providence the parties met. On August 15, 1845, 108 settlers walked into the valley Durst and Streiff had bought for them, and named it New Glarus.
New Glarus at Its Peak
For its first seventy-five years New Glarus was as close to a transplanted Swiss village as anywhere in the United States. The 1840s log cabins gave way to frame houses, then to the carved Alpine facades that still define the place. The Swiss Reformed congregation, organised in 1840 even before the settlement was firmly planted, built its first log church in 1849. A stone church replaced it in 1858. The current brick building at First and Fifth went up in 1900.
Wheat had been the founding crop. When the wheat economy collapsed in the late nineteenth century under chinch bugs and exhausted soil, the Swiss turned to what they had known in the cantons: cows and cheese. Rudolph Benkert, from Canton Bern by way of New York, opened the first cheese factory in Green County in 1867 and began making Limburger. Nicklaus Gerber set up another in 1868, then started the county’s first Swiss cheese factory a few years later. By the early 1880s eighteen cheese factories were operating in and around New Glarus.
Daily life moved between the dairy, the church, the school, and the saloon. The Glarner dialect, a particular Alemannic German spoken in the home canton, was the language of New Glarus into the 1920s. Children learned it from their grandmothers. Researchers from the University of Wisconsin recorded the last fluent speakers in the 1960s, and those tapes now sit in the Max Kade Institute.
Yodelling clubs, Schwingen wrestling, alphorn ensembles, flag-throwing and Talerschwingen all came across. The Wilhelm Tell pageant arrived in 1938, brought back by a New Glarus son named Edwin Barlow who decided his home village should perform Schiller’s drama of Swiss independence every Labor Day weekend. It has run every Labor Day weekend since, for three years in German only, then in English from 1941.
The Change
The change came gradually and without rupture. The Glarner dialect faded out of the home in the 1940s and 1950s as the schoolyard switched to English. The number of working cheese factories dwindled from eighteen to a handful as the industry consolidated. The village’s Swiss aesthetic shifted, slowly, from something the residents did for themselves into something visitors came to see.
Tourism took hold after World War II, then accelerated through the 1980s. The village leaned in: more chalet facades, more festivals, restored buildings at the Swiss Historical Village Museum. When Deb and Dan Carey opened the New Glarus Brewing Company in 1993, they layered a new industry on top of the old Swiss bones, and the whole place caught a second wind.
What did not change was the bloodline. Census after census, roughly two thirds of New Glarus residents have continued to claim Swiss ancestry. Last names on the church rolls still read Durst, Streiff, Tschudy, Kundert, Hefty, Stauffacher, Becker, Elmer. The Glarner valley emptied a thousand families into Green County in the second half of the nineteenth century, and most of them stayed.
The Landmarks of Swiss New Glarus
The Swiss Historical Village & Museum (612 7th Avenue) was founded in 1938, the same year as the Wilhelm Tell pageant, and is the closest thing the diaspora has to its own open-air archive. Fourteen buildings stand on landscaped grounds: an 1845 log cabin, a smithy, a schoolhouse, a print shop, a Swiss bee house, the Kundert cheese factory with its original kettles, and the white-painted 1890 Swiss Reformed Church moved in from the country. The Hall of History at the entrance tells the emigration story from the Glarner side.
Chalet of the Golden Fleece Museum (618 2nd Street) is the strangest, most personal landmark in town. Edwin Barlow, the world-traveller who brought back Schiller, also brought back Etruscan earrings, a watch said to have belonged to Louis XVI, and a 350-year-old slate-inlaid table.
In 1937 he had New Glarus architect Jacob Rieder build him a Bernese chalet at the top of 2nd Street, with the kind of carved gables you only see on the right side of a Swiss alpine map. On his death he gave it all to the village. It is one of only three authentic Swiss chalets in Wisconsin.
New Glarus Bakery (534 1st Street) has been turning out bratzeli, springerli, nut horns, pfeffernusse and stollen since 1910, when Albert Wolfe opened the doors and, six years later, put up the building it still occupies. Angela Neff has been the baker-owner since 2004. The display case in February reads like an inventory of someone’s Glarner grandmother’s pantry.
Glarner Stube (518 1st Street) is the Swiss restaurant on the main street where you go for rosti, raclette, Kalberwurst, and a glass of something Glarner. It is small, wood-panelled, and looks the way a Swiss restaurant in a Wisconsin village should look.
Swiss United Church of Christ sits at First Street and Fifth Avenue, the brick 1900 building that replaced the 1858 stone church that replaced the 1849 log church. The congregation has been gathering on this corner since 1849 and tracing its formal organisation back to 1840. The pioneer cemetery beside it holds Durst, Streiff, and most of the names from the 1845 register.
New Glarus Brewing Company (2400 State Highway 69) is the village’s most famous export that the village will not let leave. Deb Carey founded the brewery in 1993 as a gift to her brewmaster husband Dan, raising the capital herself and becoming the first woman to found and operate a brewery in the United States. Their Spotted Cow farmhouse ale, launched in 1997, is now the best-selling draft beer in Wisconsin and is sold nowhere else. The hilltop brewery on Highway 69 looks like a Swiss monastery and pours about forty-five thousand barrels of Spotted Cow a year.
The Wilhelm Tell Festival takes over the wooded valley off Highway W every Labor Day weekend. More than two hundred local volunteers stage Schiller’s 1804 drama of Swiss independence on the hillside, in English and German. It has run since 1938. It is one of the longest continuously-running outdoor dramas in America, and the cast list reads like a census of New Glarus surnames.
Where the New Glarus Swiss Came From
The 1845 founders came almost entirely from Canton Glarus, the small Alemannic, Protestant canton tucked between the lakes and the Glarner Alps in eastern Switzerland. The original 193 emigrants were drawn from the villages of the Linth valley and its side branches: Matt, Elm, Schwanden, Engi, Mollis, Netstal, Glarus town itself. They were weavers, cotton printers, spinners and small farmers thrown out of work by the textile collapse of the early 1840s.
As the colony took hold, chain migration broadened the catchment. Later Swiss arrivals to Green County came from Canton Bern, which sent the dairying expertise that built the cheese economy after 1867. Smaller contingents arrived from Schwyz, Uri, Graubunden, and other German-speaking cantons. The result was a community that read as Glarner in dialect and surname, with a Bernese accent at the cheese kettle.
New Glarus Today
New Glarus in 2026 is two things at once. It is a working Wisconsin village with a school, a church, a brewery, a bakery, and dairy farms in every direction. It is also a heritage town that the rest of the Midwest drives in to visit, especially on Labor Day weekend and during the Heidi Festival every June.
The Swiss bloodline is still here, thinned by intermarriage and softened by time, but unmistakable on the church rolls and the festival rosters. The Glarner dialect has gone. The cheese factories have mostly gone, though Wisconsin remains the country’s leading producer of “foreign type” cheeses and Green County still calls itself the Swiss Cheese Capital. The brewery boomed. The pageant continues.
What endures is not a museum piece. It is a particular village that knows what it is. The alphorn still answers itself off the hills on the first Sunday in August, and the children at Volksfest still learn to throw the flag the way their great-great-grandparents did in the Linth valley before the textile mills closed.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did the Swiss settle in New Glarus?
The Swiss settled in New Glarus because the Glarner Auswanderungsgesellschaft, the Glarus Emigration Society, organised a colony in 1845 to relieve poverty caused by the collapse of the canton’s textile industry. Two scouts, Niklaus Durst and Fridolin Streiff, were sent ahead and chose 1,200 acres of hilly, well-watered land in Green County, Wisconsin that reminded them of the alpine valleys back home.
Is New Glarus still Swiss today?
Yes. About two thirds of New Glarus residents still claim Swiss ancestry, and the village maintains an active Swiss cultural calendar including the Wilhelm Tell Festival, the Heidi Festival, and Volksfest. The Glarner dialect faded out of daily speech by the 1950s, but Swiss food, architecture, festivals, and surnames remain central to the village’s identity.
What are the most famous Swiss landmarks in New Glarus?
The most famous Swiss landmarks in New Glarus are the Swiss Historical Village & Museum at 612 7th Avenue, the Chalet of the Golden Fleece at 618 2nd Street, the Swiss United Church of Christ at First and Fifth, the New Glarus Bakery at 534 1st Street, and the New Glarus Brewing Company on Highway 69. The Wilhelm Tell pageant grounds off Highway W host the village’s signature outdoor drama every Labor Day weekend.
Where in Switzerland did the New Glarus Swiss come from?
The 1845 founders came almost entirely from Canton Glarus in eastern Switzerland, particularly from villages in the Linth valley such as Matt, Elm, Schwanden, Mollis, Netstal, and Glarus town. Later nineteenth-century arrivals broadened the catchment to include Canton Bern, which supplied the cheesemaking knowledge behind Green County’s dairy economy, and smaller numbers from Schwyz, Uri, and Graubunden.
When did the Swiss first arrive in New Glarus?
The first 108 Swiss settlers walked into the New Glarus valley on August 15, 1845, after a four-month journey from Canton Glarus via Le Havre, Baltimore, St. Louis, and Galena. They had been preceded by Niklaus Durst and Fridolin Streiff, the two scouts who arrived earlier that summer and purchased the land on July 17, 1845.
If your family’s story passed through New Glarus, or any of the places the Swiss made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a Glarner valley in 1845 to a brick church on First Street, to wherever you are now.