The Making of a Swiss Cheese Maker
When Casper arrived in New Glarus, he found a landscape very different from the Swiss Alps of his homeland. The area of Green County around New Glarus was hilly instead of mountainous. But the important thing was that the open fields were green in summer.
This photograph of New Glarus was taken around 1910. It shows what the area looked like a few years before Casper settled there.
Casper began working with his brothers, clearing land for farming. He was amazed by the size of the farms in Green County. In Switzerland, farms were tiny, with steep fields that made them difficult to till. Many of the farms in and around New Glarus were 80 or often 160 acres, more than 8 to 10 times bigger than a typical Swiss farm. Even better, because the hills were not as steep as the Swiss mountains Casper remembered, nearly all of the land could be tilled. More land also meant that crops such as corn and other vegetables could be planted and harvested.
But Casper quickly discovered that he missed making cheese. He realized he’d rather make cheese than do farmwork. Soon he was helping wash cheese in nearby Swiss cheese factories around Green County.
It is important to “wash” Swiss cheese because various molds develop on the outside of the cheese as it is cured. Casper and other workers washed cheese by regularly rubbing salty whey over the Swiss cheese wheels.
Whey is a watery by-product of making cheese. For many years, whey was a problem for cheese makers such as Casper. They didn’t know what to do with it. Some cheese makers dumped the whey into rivers and streams. Some spread it on farmers’ fields.
Many farmers who delivered milk to Casper’s cheese factory also raised pigs. Casper’s milk haulers returned whey to those farmers. They, in turn, fed the whey to their pigs. Casper’s milk trucks had space to haul milk cans and a tank to hold gallons of whey. When the milk truck arrived at a farm, the farmer could drain off some whey for his or her pigs.
Today, whey is used in many ways besides food for pigs. It’s used in bakery products, energy bars, and infant formulas. Researchers are also looking for nonfood uses of whey. For example, researchers in California are studying whether whey can be used to make edible food containers. Whey is no longer a useless by-product of cheese making. It’s now a valuable product in its own right.
Washing cheese was hard work. It meant lifting and turning heavy, round wheels of cheese, some weighing as much as 200 pounds! Casper earned money for several years as a hired man in cheese factories around New Glarus.
Casper’s future wife, Frieda Fuhrer, on a steamship crossing the Atlantic Ocean. She also left Switzerland to make a new life in the United States.
When he had free time, Casper often visited Monroe, a town also home to many Swiss immigrants. One day in 1920, he met a beautiful young woman named Frieda Fuhrer (free da fur her). She worked there in Mrs. Engles’s candy and antiques store. Frieda had come to the United States from Switzerland. She had stayed with cousins in a Swiss community in Indiana before moving to Wisconsin. Casper and Frieda started meeting regularly at the shop and soon became a couple. On February 21, 1921, they were married.
Frieda and Casper on their wedding day in 1921. Standing behind them are Casper’s brother Andrew and his wife, Marie.
Around this time, Casper was working in a Green County cheese factory near Albany. Frieda helped out at the factory, too. She did just about everything! She filled the kettles and washed the cheese.
Casper worked in cheese factories in each of these towns in Green County. He moved north to work in Antigo, but returned to southern Wisconsin after a year.
A few years later, in 1923, Casper and Frieda moved to northeastern Wisconsin so that Casper could go to work for Kraft Foods company in Antigo. Casper became even more skilled at cheese making. But he was working in an old and drafty building. He knew that just a 2-degree difference in temperature could change the quality of the cheese. Casper became frustrated because he was not able to control the temperature in the cheese factory. After 1 year, the Jaggis returned to Green County. Casper made cheese for a year at County Line Factory near Albany.
Casper’s wife, Frieda, helped make cheese in copper kettles. This picture was taken in the early 1920s.
For the next 15 years, from 1925 to 1940, Casper worked as a cheese maker for the Coldren Cheese Factory near Brodhead in Green County. This was a cooperative factory. The farmers who delivered milk to the Coldren Cheese Factory owned the business, and Casper worked for them. But Casper owned the cheese-making equipment, so he earned a percentage of the money the factory took in from selling its cheese. He and Frieda moved into an apartment right above the factory.
Casper (at left) and other workers at the Coldren Cheese Factory near Brodhead. Each kettle produced one wheel of Swiss cheese.
Casper (in overalls) with members of the Coldren Cheese Factory cooperative. He and Frieda lived in an apartment on the second floor.
How is milk different from cheese? Everyone knows the answer to that. You drink milk, and you eat cheese. Milk is 89 percent water. Cheese is 42 percent water. That’s why you drink milk and eat cheese.
Cheese is made from milk. It takes 10 pounds of milk to make just one pound of cheese!
Milk and cheese are good for you. They contain fat, minerals, and protein. Milk and cheese also have lots of calcium, which is needed for strong bones. One ounce of natural Swiss cheese, like the kind Casper made, provides about 270 milligrams of calcium. A glass of low-fat milk has about 300 milligrams of calcium.
Young boys and girls need approximately 1,000 milligrams of calcium each day. So if you drink a glass of low-fat milk and eat a small piece of Swiss cheese daily, you will have more than half the calcium you need to build healthy bones!
Okay, so how does milk become cheese? Have you heard the nursery rhyme “Little Miss Muffet”? It goes like this: “Little Miss Muffet sat on her tuffet eating her curds and whey.” Do you know what she was eating? She was eating freshly made cheese similar to cottage cheese. When cheese is made, milk is separated into curds and whey. Curds are really small hunks of cheese. And you already know about the watery whey. Separating curds from whey is one step in the cheese-making process.
While Casper was working at the Coldren Cheese Factory in 1938, he and Frieda adopted their son, Fritz. At the time, Fritz was 18 months old. Five years later Casper and Frieda adopted their daughter, Annabelle, when she was 6 months old. Fritz enjoyed being around the cheese factory, especially when his family lived right upstairs. He liked seeing the hard-working men and the equipment. Annabelle didn’t enjoy anything about cheese making, however. She rarely went inside the factory.
Frieda and Casper outside the Coldren Cheese Factory in 1938 with their newly adopted son, Fritz.
In 1941, Casper bought his own cheese factory. It was also located in Green County, in the town of Brodhead. He called it the Brodhead Swiss Cheese Factory. By the 1950s, it was the largest Swiss cheese factory in Wisconsin. It was a modern plant with 18 big copper kettles for making Swiss cheese. Casper had 12 to 14 employees. Many of them were also Swiss. Together, they made 26 wheels of Swiss cheese every day in the summer. Summer was the busiest time in the factory. That’s when cows were feeding on grass and producing more milk.
The milk for Casper’s cheese came from local farmers. Casper paid them based on the number of pounds of milk they sent to the factory and the butterfat content of the milk. Cheese makers wanted milk with more butterfat because it would yield greater amounts of cheese than milk with a lower amount of butterfat.
Testing Milk for Its Butterfat Content
Each farmer’s milk was sampled and tested almost every day for its butterfat content. The higher the amount of butterfat, the more money the farmer received.
The amount of butterfat generally depended on the breed of cow giving the milk. For example, milk from a Jersey cow can have 5.5 percent butterfat, while milk from a Holstein cow might have only 3 percent butterfat. And butterfat content changes throughout the year for the same breed, depending on what a cow is eating. When a cow is fed a dry feed such as hay, the butterfat content of its milk will be higher than when it is grazing out in the pasture in the summer.
The butterfat content of a cow’s milk varies from breed to breed. A Guernsey, a cow with a reddish-brown coat, is pictured on the left. A black-and-white Holstein is on the right.
Some of Casper’s cheese was sold at a shop located right in his Brodhead Swiss Cheese Factory. He also trucked it to Monroe and nearby Monticello. But most of his Swiss cheese was bought by a wholesaler. The wholesaler then sold Casper’s cheese in Chicago.
The wholesaler sent one or two workers once a week in summer and once or twice a month in winter to pick up the cheese. They’d take the train from Chicago to Brodhead. When the train stopped, a railcar would be sent down a spur that headed from the main track right to the doors of Casper’s factory! The workers would spend the day loading cheese onto the railcar. Remember that cows give more milk in the summer? For a cheese maker, more milk equals more cheese. So, in summer, the wholesaler’s workers might have to stay overnight so they could fill another railcar with Casper’s cheese the next day.
Casper was always coming up with ways to save time and have cheese making be less strenuous on his workers. Cheese needed to be stirred constantly to keep it from burning. This work could be tiring, so Casper helped design a mechanical stirrer and a mechanical cheese harp. He also used a car part from a Model T to mechanize production in his factory.
A spur off the main railroad track led right up to the back of Casper’s Brodhead Swiss Cheese Factory. Can you find the tracks in this photo?
But Casper was more than just a skilled and innovative cheese maker. He was also a good manager, and this talent contributed to his success as a businessman. He knew how to work with other people and how to get the best from them.
Casper was never harsh with his employees and was always concerned about them and their families. He knew that to make good cheese, he had to keep his workers happy. He also knew how to get along with the farmers whose milk he bought. He understood that to receive quality milk, he needed to keep the farmers happy, too. Sometimes Casper would help a farmer make hay or cut wood.
Much of Casper’s success was due to his “people skills.” But without a good product, all the people skills in the world made no difference. Casper’s business did well because of his ability to produce outstanding Swiss cheese. Customers bought his cheese because they thought it was delicious. Someone even ordered Casper’s Swiss cheese from Korea, halfway around the world from Wisconsin. The postage to mail it cost more than the cheese!
