Long before the Sugar River trail became one of the best-known ways to move through the countryside around New Glarus, the same corridor carried milk, cheese, livestock, lumber, coal and freight cars into and out of the village. The old depot that many people now see as the beginning or end of the trail was once part of a much larger railroad world at the terminus of the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul line from Brodhead.

That railroad did not drift into New Glarus by accident. The village wanted it, needed it and fought for it, and when it finally arrived in 1887 it changed the community in ways that still echo across the landscape today.