On the broad limestone square in the centre of Monroe, Wisconsin, the smell hits you before the history does. It drifts out of Baumgartner’s, sharp and unmistakable, the scent of Limburger sliced onto rye with raw onion and a smear of mustard. That smell is the reason the Swiss in Monroe are not a footnote but a living institution. For more than a century and a half, this small Green County town has been the closest thing America has to a corner of the old cantons, a place where a clock tower keeps time over a courthouse square and the cheese is still cut by hand.
The Place
Monroe sits in the rolling dairy country of southern Wisconsin, the seat of Green County, roughly forty miles south of Madison and a short drive from the Illinois line. Its population hovers around 10,500, and its physical heart is the Historic Courthouse Square, an open block anchored by the Richardsonian Romanesque Green County Courthouse, built in 1891.
The town markets itself, with some justification, as the “Swiss Cheese Capital of the USA”, a title it claimed in 1923. Green County as a whole is sometimes called “America’s Little Switzerland”. Neither phrase is idle boosterism. The county still produces more cheese than any other in Wisconsin and is home to more Master Cheesemakers than any other county, or indeed any other state, in America.
What makes Monroe unusual is how legible its heritage remains. The Swiss did not pass through here and vanish into the general American blur. They built, they stayed, and they kept making the thing they came knowing how to make.
How It Became Swiss
Lead first, then milk
Monroe did not begin as a Swiss place. It was founded in 1847, in a corner of Wisconsin shaped by the lead-mining boom that drew settlers up from the south in the early nineteenth century. The first arrivals were a mix of Yankees and other Americans, and the early economy leaned on mining and wheat.
The Swiss story properly begins a few miles up the road, in 1845, two years before Monroe itself was incorporated. That year a party of immigrants from the Swiss canton of Glarus founded a settlement they named New Glarus, in the same county. Their arrival would change the character of the entire region, Monroe included, and the story of the Swiss in New Glarus is the prologue to Monroe’s own.
The Glarus emigration
The reason the Swiss left is unromantic and specific. In the 1840s the canton of Glarus, southeast of Zurich, was a centre of textile work, and the Industrial Revolution and a recession had gutted its economy. The canton could no longer support its weavers and cloth printers, and crop failures deepened the misery.
In 1845 the Glarus authorities took an extraordinary step: they treated emigration as public policy. The canton charged two men, Fridolin Streiff and Nicolas Duerst, with sailing to North America to find suitable land for a colony. They settled on the green hills of southern Wisconsin, and the first contingent, desperately poor and largely without farming experience, arrived that same year. They learned to grow wheat and raise dairy cattle, and in time the dairy cattle would matter most.
From a glut of milk, a market in cheese
Wisconsin’s wheat soils wore out, and across the state farmers turned to dairy. For the Swiss of Green County this was not a pivot but a homecoming. They already knew how to turn milk into cheese that would keep and travel, the alpine craft of their grandfathers. The same instinct carried other Swiss colonies across the Midwest, including the Swiss of Berne, Indiana, who built their own dairy economy out of the old-country know-how.
By the late nineteenth century the county was dotted with small cheese factories, each fed by the farms around it. At the peak there were some 300 cheese factories in Green County. Monroe, with its rail connection and its courthouse-square market, became the commercial hub where the cheese was bought, sold, and shipped.
The specialism here was Swiss-style cheese: the holed Emmentaler-type wheels Americans simply call “Swiss”, along with pungent Limburger and the related washed-rind cheeses. Monroe became, for a long stretch of the twentieth century, the centre of American Limburger production, a distinction it has never fully surrendered.
Building a Swiss civic life
The community did not only make cheese. In 1868 the Swiss of Monroe established a Turner Hall, part of the German-speaking Turnverein movement that combined gymnastics, music, theatre and civic life. It is believed to be the only Turner Hall of Swiss origin left in the United States, and one of the oldest continuously running Swiss institutions in the country.
The first hall burned to the ground in 1936 and was rebuilt on the same site in 1938 in the Swiss chalet style it still wears today. That building tied the town’s identity to the square as firmly as any cheese factory did.
Cheese Days
In 1914 a group of Monroe men travelled to Forreston, Illinois, for that town’s Sauerkraut Day and came home determined to celebrate their own signature product. Local businessmen organised the first Green County Cheese Days in a matter of days, and it has been held on the Historic Courthouse Square ever since. It is the oldest food festival in the Midwest. Once annual, it now runs biennially, on the third weekend of September in even-numbered years, and it remains the high holy day of the town’s Swiss identity.
The Landmarks
Baumgartner’s Cheese Store and Tavern, 1023 16th Avenue. Emil Baumgartner opened in 1931 to sell equipment to the county’s hundreds of cheese factories. When the Depression left those factories unable to pay in cash, they paid in cheese, and Baumgartner’s became a cheese store and tavern instead. It is Wisconsin’s oldest cheese store, and its Limburger sandwich, three slices on rye with raw onion and mustard, is one of the most famous and most pungent in America.
Turner Hall of Monroe, 1217 17th Avenue. Established in 1868 and rebuilt in chalet style in 1938, this is believed to be the last Swiss Turner Hall in the country. It still houses a theatre, a bowling alley, and the Ratskeller restaurant. It is listed on the National and State Registers of Historic Places and is documented by the Wisconsin Historical Society.
The Ratskeller, in the lower level of Turner Hall. The walls chronicle the story of Swiss immigration, and the menu reads like a cantonal phrasebook: Kalberwuerst, Schnitzel, Schueblig, Kaesechuechli, Aelplermagronen. It is the rare American restaurant where the everyday dishes are genuinely Swiss rather than Swiss-themed.
Green County Courthouse, 1016 16th Avenue. Built in 1891 to a design by architect G. Stanley Mansfield, this Richardsonian Romanesque landmark anchors the square. Its clock tower presides over Cheese Days, the farmers’ market, and the daily business of the town, and it remains the visual symbol of Monroe.
National Historic Cheesemaking Center, 2108 6th Avenue. Housed in a restored railroad depot, the museum tells the story of Wisconsin cheesemaking and preserves the Imobersteg farmstead cheese factory on its grounds. It is the institutional memory of the craft that built the town.
Roth Kaese, established 1991. Cousins Fermo Jaeckle and Felix Roth chose Monroe for its milk, its existing cheesemaking infrastructure, and its Swiss heritage. The Monroe plant was the first in the country to install a copper vat for making its Grand Cru, a deliberate echo of alpine technique on Wisconsin soil.
The Swiss Colony. The mail-order food company traces back to a 1925 marketing-class project by Ray Kubly, a University of Wisconsin student and Monroe native who built a fictitious cheese business around his hometown’s most famous product. It began selling cheese in earnest in 1926 and became the oldest specialty food catalogue in the United States, run from Monroe ever since.
Where They Came From
The founding stock of Green County’s Swiss came overwhelmingly from the German-speaking cantons, above all Glarus, with significant numbers from Bern. The 1845 New Glarus colony was a deliberate, state-sponsored transplant from Glarus, and the chain migration it set off pulled relatives, neighbours and whole valleys across the Atlantic over the following decades.
These were not, at first, farmers. They were textile workers displaced by industrialisation, people who had to learn dairying after they arrived. What they carried instead was the alpine cheesemaking tradition embedded in their home villages, knowledge that turned out to be worth more in Wisconsin than any plough skill.
The waves continued from the 1840s through the 1880s, and by the early twentieth century the Swiss presence in Green County was dense enough to give Monroe its lasting character. Wisconsin’s wider immigrant map runs deep, from the Poles of Stevens Point to the Hmong of Eau Claire, and Monroe’s Swiss are one of its oldest threads. In the 2020s, census ancestry figures still record Swiss as one of Monroe’s notable origins, around 6.6 per cent, a remarkably high share for an American town generations after the last big wave.
Monroe Today
Monroe is not a theme park, and it does not pretend to be. It is a working county seat with a courthouse, schools, a hospital, and the ordinary churn of small-town American life. The Swiss heritage is woven through that ordinariness rather than staged on top of it.
The cheese economy has narrowed since its peak. The 300 factories of a century ago are down to roughly a dozen, the survivors larger and more industrial than the little co-ops they replaced. Limburger, once made all over the county, is now made by very few hands. Yet Green County remains Wisconsin’s top cheese-producing county and its deepest concentration of Master Cheesemakers, so the craft has consolidated rather than died.
The clearest sign of the heritage is its rhythm. Every other September the square fills for Cheese Days, the Ratskeller serves Aelplermagronen on a weeknight, and Baumgartner’s still hands a newcomer a Limburger sandwich with a mint on top, as if daring them to flinch. The Swiss in Monroe are not a memory the town curates. They are the town, still cutting cheese on the square their great-grandparents built.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why are there so many Swiss in Monroe, Wisconsin?
The Swiss in Monroe trace back to an 1845 state-sponsored emigration from the canton of Glarus, which founded nearby New Glarus and seeded the whole of Green County. Crop failures and the collapse of the canton’s textile economy pushed weavers and cloth printers to seek land in Wisconsin, and chain migration kept the flow going for decades.
What is Monroe, Wisconsin known for?
Monroe is known as the “Swiss Cheese Capital of the USA”, a title it claimed in 1923. It is the long-time centre of American Limburger production, the home of Wisconsin’s oldest cheese store at Baumgartner’s, and the host of Green County Cheese Days, the oldest food festival in the Midwest.
What is Green County Cheese Days?
Cheese Days is a festival first held on Monroe’s Historic Courthouse Square in 1914, after local men returned inspired from a Sauerkraut Day in Forreston, Illinois. It celebrates the county’s cheesemaking and Swiss heritage and now runs biennially, on the third weekend of September in even-numbered years.
What Swiss food can you eat in Monroe?
The Ratskeller in Turner Hall serves genuinely Swiss dishes such as Kalberwuerst, Kaesechuechli and Aelplermagronen, while Baumgartner’s is famous for its Limburger sandwich on rye with raw onion and mustard. Both are anchored on or near the courthouse square.
Is Monroe related to New Glarus?
Yes. Both sit in Green County, and the Swiss in Monroe and the surrounding area descend largely from the same 1845 Glarus colony that founded New Glarus two years before Monroe was incorporated. The two towns share a heritage, though New Glarus leans harder into a postcard Swiss-village look while Monroe wears its Swiss identity through its cheese culture.
Is Turner Hall in Monroe really the last of its kind?
Turner Hall of Monroe, established in 1868 and rebuilt in chalet style in 1938, is believed to be the only Turner Hall of Swiss origin still standing in the United States. It remains a working community centre with a theatre, bowling alley and the Ratskeller restaurant, and is listed on the National and State Registers of Historic Places.
If your family’s story passed through Monroe, or any of the places the Swiss have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From the textile valleys of Glarus and Bern to the courthouse square and cheese factories of Green County, to wherever you are now.