Memorial Day is often measured in quiet moments. A flag stirring in the breeze. Fresh flowers placed beside a headstone. The distant sound of a bugle carrying across a cemetery.

In New Glarus, one of the names most closely tied to that day is Walter W. Stuessy.

More than a century after his death, his name remains familiar to generations of local residents through the Stuessy-Kuenzi American Legion Post No. 141. Yet behind that name was a young man whose life began in the rolling hills of Green County and ended amid the mud, smoke and devastation of the largest battle in American military history.

Walter Stuessy was born Feb. 9, 1896, in New Glarus, the son of local harness maker Salomon Stuessy and Anna Magdalena Becker Stuessy. He grew up in a village that was still closely tied to its Swiss roots and surrounded by family farms. Like many young men of his generation, he spent his young adult years working as a farmhand in the countryside around New Glarus.