Meet Casper Jaggi
America’s Dairyland. Those two words on Wisconsin license plates tell you a lot about the state and its agricultural heritage. As you drive along country roads in Wisconsin, you’ll see barns and cows grazing in fields nearby. Some of their milk becomes something you drink. Some of the milk is used to make cheese.
A Wisconsin license plate
Many European immigrants who settled in Wisconsin more than 100 years ago brought their cheese-making traditions with them. One of them was Casper Jaggi (kas pur yah gee), who came from Switzerland and moved to Green County. To this day, that part of the state is famous for its cheese.
Casper Jaggi in his Brodhead Swiss Cheese Factory with Kenneth Clark (wearing the hat), one of his workers.
Casper became an expert at making Swiss cheese and produced a lot of it. He eventually owned the largest Swiss cheese factory in Wisconsin in the 1950s.
This is the story of an entrepreneur who started a company doing something he loved. But cheese making was more than a business for Casper. It was an art. It also continued a family tradition. When he was a little boy, Casper learned about cheese making from his father. Casper later passed these skills on to his son, Fritz, when Fritz also was just a young boy.
Casper Jaggi is an example of the many immigrant cheese makers who came to Wisconsin with special skills and contributed greatly to the state’s agricultural history. He and others like him set the pace for the master cheese makers in Wisconsin today.