Heritage

Stories and archival features focused on New Glarus history, from early settlement and Swiss heritage to long-forgotten events, buildings, and people. This section preserves the community’s past while connecting it to the present.

125 posts

When New Glarus Built Its Own Haunted Houses

Before professional haunted attractions, New Glarus organizations built their own scares from empty buildings, cardboard boxes, volunteers and imagination — raising money for the community while creating October memories that lasted for decades.

by Todd Klassy

Historic Photo: Downtown New Glarus from Above in 1957

A 1957 aerial view captures much of downtown New Glarus before several familiar buildings disappeared or changed uses, while the railroad, swimming pool and old commercial blocks offer plenty of clues — and a few mysteries for readers to solve.

by Todd Klassy

Harvest: How Farming Reshaped the Hills Around New Glarus

Long before combines rolled across fields of corn and soybeans, harvest around New Glarus meant wheat, barley, hand-cut grain, corn shocks, mill ponds and hard lessons about erosion — a story still visible in the shape of the countryside nearly two centuries later.

by Todd Klassy

Top 10 Geological Facts That Explain New Glarus

The hills around New Glarus preserve a story that begins in tropical seas, survives an Ice Age at the edge of a glacier and continues beneath local farms today, in fossils, springs, sandstone, soils and even traces of Wisconsin's lead country.

by Todd Klassy

What Are the Origins of Homecoming?

Long before Friday night football, royalty and a school dance became familiar fall traditions, “homecoming” meant something simpler: come back, reconnect and celebrate. Its path to New Glarus stretches through more than a century of American life.

by Todd Klassy

How New Glarus Helped Build the World Dairy Expo

Long before World Dairy Expo became a global gathering in Madison, New Glarus farmers, cheesemakers and Swiss traditions were helping shape Wisconsin dairy. One local family would later help create the Expo — and New Glarus never stopped showing up.

by Todd Klassy

Historic Photo: The New Glarus Trolley That Never Was

A 1912 postcard looking north on 2nd Street shows a horse and buggy, one distant smokestack — and a streetcar New Glarus never had. Fifteen years later, the same intersection reveals how much of the real village had changed by then.

by Todd Klassy

Before New Glarus: The Indigenous Landscape Beneath Us

Long before Swiss settlers arrived in 1845, people lived, worked and buried their dead across the hills around New Glarus. State archaeological records preserve traces of an older landscape — including a Woodland mound close to today's village.

by Todd Klassy

The World Champion Buried Near Highway 69

Thousands of drivers pass the old Cold Springs Farm between New Glarus and Monroe without knowing a world-champion pacer lies buried there, a surviving link to the era when Green County horses raced among the nation's best in America.

by Todd Klassy

Historic Photo: New Glarus Before Highway 69

An early-1900s view looking west captures New Glarus when pasture still stretched across what would become Highway 69, revealing familiar landmarks, a railroad, a grazing cow and clues that help narrow when the photograph was taken.

by Todd Klassy

How Lead Mining Helped Build New Glarus

Long before dairy farming defined New Glarus, lead mines, wagon roads and mining towns had already reshaped southwestern Wisconsin — and the young Swiss colony depended on that economy in ways that are easy to overlook entirely today.

by Todd Klassy

When Wisconsin Changed What It Meant to Be 18

For Generation X in New Glarus, Wisconsin’s march from 18 to 19 to 21 split classmates, reshaped college life and sent a rite of passage underground — leaving behind stories of fake IDs, basement parties and a changing definition of adulthood.

by Todd Klassy

Showing 12 of 125 total posts

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