When Brown Swiss cows walk the parade route, alphorns sound and people dressed in embroidered Swiss clothing fill the streets of Monroe this weekend, Cheese Days will look unmistakably like a Monroe tradition. Look a little closer, however, and much of the story points north to New Glarus.

Cheese Days belongs to Monroe. The festival was created there in 1914 and Monroe became the commercial center of Green County’s enormous cheese industry. But newspapers promoting Cheese Day a century ago routinely traced the origins of that industry back to the Swiss settlers who founded New Glarus in 1845. A 1923 Rockford Register Star account stated plainly that the Swiss cheese industry originated with the settlement of New Glarus.

And before there was cheese, there were cows. Swiss settlers in New Glarus were the first to bring dairy cows to Green County, bringing with them a culture of dairying and cheesemaking from Switzerland. Early settlers initially relied heavily on wheat, but crop failures eventually accelerated the shift toward dairy farming. The same 1923 account credited that change with helping turn Green County into one of the nation’s most productive dairy regions.