Origins
Monroe’s first settlers showed up around 1835, a generation before anybody thought of the place as cheese country. The lead deposits of southwestern Wisconsin drew prospectors and their families. The soil, and the Sugar and Pecatonica rivers, gave them a reason to stay after the mining played out.
The settlement was named for President James Monroe. It grew into the commercial center and county seat of Green County and was incorporated as a city in 1882.
Green County itself was split off from Iowa County in 1837. A popular story says it was named for Revolutionary War Gen. Nathanael Greene. The county’s own 1884 history says otherwise. William Boyles of Monroe, the area’s representative, picked “Green” for the color of the countryside and refused to add the “e.”
The Swiss arrive
The Swiss came to Green County in August 1845, when settlers from Canton Glarus founded New Glarus, about 15 miles north of Monroe. Crop failures and hard times back home kept more of them coming for decades, with especially big waves after the Civil War. The hills and pastures reminded them of home.
They brought cheesemaking skills with them. In 1868, Nicholas Gerber opened the county’s first cheese factory in a log house southwest of New Glarus, with milk from five local farmers. He started with Limburger. Swiss cheese followed.
By the early 1900s, Green County was one of the most important cheese counties in the state. By 1925 it had 63,418 cows, according to the National Historic Cheesemaking Center. That’s about three for every person who lived there.
Cheese Days
In October 1914, five Monroe men went to a sauerkraut festival in Forreston, Ill., and came home figuring cheese deserved a party, too. Local businessmen put the first Cheese Day together in 19 days and drove a roadster around town to promote it. A hand-lettered sign on the car read, “FIRST CHEESE DAY COMMITTEE 1914, WE STARTED SOMETHING!”
The first Cheese Day was held Oct. 28, 1914. Visitors got free cheese sandwiches. By 1916, the festival went through a ton of Swiss cheese for those sandwiches.
Today Cheese Days is held the third weekend of September in even-numbered years. The 100th anniversary celebration drew more than 100,000 people to the Courthouse Square.
Courthouse Square
That square is built around the Green County Courthouse, a Richardsonian Romanesque building finished in 1891 and listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1978. Monroe had to fight off a bid from nearby Monticello to keep the county seat before it was built.
The Monroe Arts Center, in a former Methodist church, and blocks of late 19th century homes round out the historic core.
The National Historic Cheesemaking Center
The National Historic Cheesemaking Center, in a restored railroad depot, tells the story of the county’s cheese industry with old equipment, a historic farmstead cheese factory and the histories of local cheesemakers.
Monroe today
Monroe had 10,661 residents in the 2020 census. Cheese is still central to the economy. Klondike Cheese makes cheese here, and the Alp and Dell Cheese Store sells it. Decatur Dairy is down the road near Brodhead.
SSM Health Monroe Hospital serves Green County and the surrounding area, and The Swiss Colony mail-order business has called Monroe home for about a century.
Come for Cheese Days. Order a Limburger sandwich. You’ll be talking about it for a week.
