It doesn’t get more Swiss than this.
How authentically Swiss depends on whom you talk to.
“A lot of people come to our town as visitors, or retire here, just because of its Swiss heritage and the traditions we observe,” says Michael Nevil, a native New Glarner who’s president of the local chamber of commerce and also a member of its volunteer fire brigade.
Other residents of southwest Wisconsin’s self-styled “Little Switzerland” seem vaguely embarrassed by the half-timbered Alpine architecture that makes their town a storybook cliche, albeit a charming cliche.
“While we have a number of chalets, we are not a Disneyland and we don’t wish to resemble a theme park,” sniffs Dennis Streiff, a fourth-generation Swiss-American who lives in this bedroom community located 30 miles south of Madison.
Still, when waitresses in the town’s taverns sport dirndls and you overhear Swiss-German conversations in the street and cowbells clank when you enter the shops, and yodeling classes and competitions abound, it doesn’t really matter what’s echt Swiss and what’s only a gussied-up imitation.
Sturdily built and soft-spoken, Nevil, 53, admits to being half Swiss, a quarter German and a quarter Irish. (“My mother jumped the fence,” he laughs.) He speaks proudly about his hometown as he sips a glass of fruity, locally produced Spotted Cow ale at one of the tables in the narrow glassed-in porch of the New Glarus Hotel Restaurant.
Wiping the foam from his mustache, Nevil points out the sights below.
Across the street is Ruef’s Meat Market, which specializes in the jerkylike sausage known as landjaeger and boasts of being the home of “the only real landjaegers in the country.” It also sells kalberwurst (a mild veal sausage that has long been a Sunday-dinner staple in many an area household) and bratwursts in various flavors ranging from cheddar cheese and onion to cranberry and pineapple.
Next to Ruef’s is the Baeckerei Konditorei, the latest incarnation of the town bakery, whose glass display cases are filled with a fragrant array of breads and pastries, including anise springerle cookies and marzipan-flavored bratzeli.
On another corner is a town landmark, the Glarner Stube (“The Living Room of New Glarus”), a cozy, cedar-paneled room that serves up a fine pot of fondue and Swiss-cheesy roesti, or hash brown potatoes. It claims to house the Midwest’s largest urinal — not a bad thing for a restaurant that dispenses so many beers and ales. The owners hawk 50-cent postcards of the urinal so folks back home won’t think you’re making this up.
“Look,” Nevil says, pointing up the street. “We have our own Cows on Parade!”
Sure enough, fiberglass bovines graze, motionless, up and down the sidewalk. There are 16 of the creatively decorated cows scattered around town. Patterned after Chicago’s Cows on Parade (an idea Chicago borrowed from Zurich), some cows are attired in Swiss regional costumes; others wear white edelweiss and red alpenroses.
Are we sufficiently Swissed-out yet? I wonder to myself.
Home of Swiss cheese
The residents of New Glarus are fond of pointing out their town is where Swiss cheese got its start in the New World.
They also like to remind visitors that Old World customs, solid small-town values and a more tranquil lifestyle are not feel-good platitudes here — they really mean something at a time when American culture is becoming ever more homogenized and society’s pace ever more frantic.
New Glarus (Glare-us) is tucked in the gentle hills of lower Wisconsin, less than three hours’ drive from the Loop. A sign on Wisconsin Highway 69 leading into town cites a population of 2,111, but Nevil says it’s closer to 2,300.
The town was settled in 1845 by 108 hardy immigrants who traveled more than 7,000 miles from the canton of Glarus, Switzerland. It was the only time in Swiss history when the government sponsored an emigration colony to another nation to help ease local economic depression.
Check out the town’s telephone directory and you’ll see the names of descendants of the original families, names such as Aebli, Babler, Klassy, Stauffacher and Trumpi.
Of course, New Glarus is far from being the only “Little Switzerland” in America, since miniature Helvetias dot the map from Alaska to West Virginia. But it is the one U.S. city the Swiss in Switzerland know the best. Until recently, Swiss tour groups made pilgrimages to New Glarus, and every year New Glarus sent its own groups to Glarus, a thriving canton in East Central Switzerland whose population is roughly 10 times that of its Wisconsin namesake.
But group tourism has fallen on hard times over the last decade or so in New Glarus, and luring visitors remains one of the stiffest challenges facing a village whose economy is based largely on how much beer, sausage and Swiss-style tchotchkes it can peddle.
“The culture and the people are changing,” concedes Hans Lenzlinger, a Swiss emigre who owns the 70-room Chalet Landhaus Inn, the New Glarus Hotel Restaurant and the Tyrol Basin, a downhill ski and snowboarding area in the vicinity.
“We work very hard to attract the senior groups, but it’s really a challenge nowadays, because they all want to go to the casinos elsewhere,” Lenzlinger says. “The big international tours are no more. The families, the younger people, all want to go to the water parks. So we are having a tough, tough time bringing in new business.”
`Honorary Swiss’
Although no more than half of the residents are of Swiss descent (the percentage is down from as much as three-quarters 40 years ago, according to the folks at the historical village museum), many are what magnanimous New Glarners consider “honorary Swiss.”
No single event better illustrates how tenaciously the locals cling to their Swiss roots — real or adopted — than the annual Volksfest, sponsored every August by the Mannerchor of New Glarus to celebrate Switzerland’s winning independence from the Holy Roman Empire in 1291.
On a balmy Sunday afternoon earlier this month, several hundred New Glarners and folks from outside the area gathered under the massive burr oaks of Tell Shooter’s Park to take in this year’s Volksfest. Adult and children’s amateur choruses, yodelers and alphorn players performed on a tiny open-air stage.
The entertainment — laced with the off-color jokes of master of ceremonies Erwin Zweifel — ranged from the charming (the New Glarus Kinderchor) to the hokey (a crossbow and darts contest in which the reigning champ, Kaye Gmur, was forced to give up her crown).
Tim Wurgler brought his Milwaukee Liederkranz Maennerchor from Milwaukee as the festival’s featured act. The choir director told the crowd it was unusual for a German choir to perform at a Swiss festival but asked for mercy on the grounds that he’s of Swiss heritage and used to live in New Glarus.
“When I went away to college in Madison decades ago, I really didn’t want anything more to do with Swiss culture,” Wurgler said after the show. “But my wife and I just built a `Swiss room’ in our Milwaukee home, with fondue and spaetzi [the Swiss version of egg dumplings] ready for cooking. That’s the kind of hold New Glarus has on me.
“Besides,” he added, grinning, “Where else can you get a good kalberwurst?”
New Glarus Chamber of Commerce: 800-527-6838; Web site: www.swisstown.com.
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jvonrhein@tribune.com
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Swiss festivals for every season
Of all the towns and hamlets in Green County, New Glarus has the richest abundance of Swiss-themed festivals pitched to visitors.
This Labor Day weekend, Sept. 2-4, brings the annual Wilhelm Tell Festival, complete with a candle parade, medieval fair and jousting tournament. The festival’s highlight invariably is the Wilhelm Tell play, Schiller’s famous drama about a 13th Century Swiss patriot. Townspeople have been presenting the play, in German and English, annually since 1938.
Early June in New Glarus brings the Roger Bright Memorial Polkafest, which pays tribute to the late local bandleader who was a beloved figure in the polka world. In late June New Glarus trumpets its Heidi Festival, which is complemented by a downtown food fair and, presumably, dirndls for days.
Octoberfest (Oct. 7-9 this year) includes a variety of live music, a tractor pull and craftmaking. On St. Nicholas Day (Dec. 3), Santa takes the kids to lunch and shop owners welcome customers with holiday specials.
— John von Rhein
