On September 11, 2001, the world stopped. For those who lived in New Glarus, a village of just 2,000 residents, the tragedy felt distant in geography but immediate in heart. The events of that day were not just headlines on a television—they were threads that connected this small Midwestern community to one of the most defining moments of the 21st century.

It was a perfect, late-summer morning in New Glarus, the kind where the sky felt endless and calm—until the world seemed to stop.

For Conni Bigler, a longtime New Glarus resident, the memory of that morning remains vivid. “I had taken the day off to prepare for our Sunday School Rally,” she recalled. “I hung a load of wash on the clothesline; it was a beautiful day. Good Morning America was on the TV in the kitchen when I came back in. I saw the smoke from the crash on the tower and actually thought it was a preview for a movie. At that moment I realized it wasn't, the 2nd plane hit. I could do nothing more that day other than glue myself to the TV and watch the same horror over and over.”

Former New Glarus High School agriculture instructor Dan Ziegler remembers being out with the seniors of the Class of 2002 when the news broke, chaperoning their yearbook photo shoot. “We had no cell phones, so we didn’t know what was going on. We walked in with total disbelief,” he said. In the days and weeks that followed, he saw a community grow even closer, becoming “even more of a family after.”