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National Geographic : 1947 Jun
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Deep in the Heart of "Swissconsin" Drawn by Theodora Price andirvin IK. Allenian New Glarus Swiss Help Make Wisconsin America's Swiss Cheese Center Twenty-five miles southwest of the State capital, Swiss pioneers a century ago carved a new home in southern Wisconsin's wilderness. They named it for the Swiss Canton from which they emigrated. Today 90 percent of the population of New Glarus is Swiss-born or of Swiss parentage. Then began a struggle for existence. Land was apportioned as in Switzerland-60 lots of 20 acres each, to each head of a family. A dozen pots, pans, and kettles, brought from Switzerland, did duty for all. A big rude shack was hastily built and in it dwelt all the families until individual huts could be erected. The colonists' salt had vanished; so they ate unsalted fish from near-by Little Sugar River. Land was broken by hand, for they had no plows or oxen. The winter of 1845-46 was a nightmare. Many of the men went to work in the lead mines at Exeter and Mineral Point. Pay was 50 cents a day. Women walked to Monroe, 18 miles away, did housework for three or four days, then took their pay in flour or old clothes, carried home on their backs. The colony finally was able to buy four yoke of oxen, which were used by the pioneers in turn to help break up the land for planting of wheat. Cows Come to New Glarus In the nick of time, friends in old Glarus sent them a check for $1,000. In the spring of 1846 some drovers from Ohio brought a herd of cows to Exeter. The colonists at- tended the sale. Expert judges of cattle all their lives, they bought the best animals in the herd--one for each family-at $12 each using part of the money sent to them from Switzerland. From 1846 until 1850, progress was heart breakingly slow. Then the Crimean War raised the price of wheat, chief crop of New Glarus in its early days, and prosperity ar rived. Stories of the colony's success were carried back to Switzerland and additional emigrants arrived, many of them well supplied with capital. The Swiss colonists turned to making cheese when they bought their first cows, and soon were selling small amounts of their homemade product in Monroe.* The business proved profitable after the close of the Civil War, and with the subsequent decline in the price of wheat and the rise of dairying in Wisconsin, New Glarus began to lay the foundations for its present-day wealth. In November, 1850, value of taxable prop erty in the township was $8,915. Twenty-six years later it had jumped to $323,996. * See "An August First in Gruyeres," by Melville Bell Grosvenor, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE, August, 1936. 783
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