Swiss Immigration to New Glarus

For nearly a century, southeastern Wisconsin and especially Green County was a hotbed of Swiss immigration. Even though the immigration slowed dramatically in the early 1900s, the area still preserves a distinctive Swiss character. Visitors can attend the annual Cheese Days festivities and get authentic Swiss food at the New Glarus Hotel or Glarner Stube restaurants. Even though the first Swiss immigrants assimilated easily into American society, New Glarus still retains strong Swiss roots.

By the mid 1800s, economic conditions in Switzerland were worsening -overpopulation stretched resources in the countryside while the Industrial Revolution caused more people to move to the cities where there weren’t enough jobs. This led to  high unemployment, especially among young people. The Swiss government encouraged its citizens to emigrate, particularly to North America, in search of better opportunities. Between 1887 and 1938 no less than 73 percent of Swiss emigrants  landed in the United States. While Swiss people of all ages and backgrounds emigrated, young adults, teenagers, and those in their thirties were most likely to emigrate. Some had no professional skills, others worked in agriculture, and still others were artisans whose jobs were now being performed by machine. Seventy percent of emigrants were unmarried, which made it easier for them to leave home as they didn’t have families to look after. Fluctuations in the American economy dictated waves of immigration: during the 1850s and 1880s there were high levels of immigration, which then peaked  in 1883 and tapered off  after 1900. However, during times of economic downturn like the 1870s, 1890s and during the Civil War, prospective immigrants did not immigrate because of the difficulty of finding work in the United States. Thus, economic conditions both in Switzerland and the United States heavily affected patterns of Swiss immigration. 

The United States was also an attractive option for immigrants because the Preemptions Act of 1841 set aside vast areas of land for sale across the country for only $1.25 an acre. It allowed individuals to acquire public land and use it as their property as long as they did something to legalize the claim, like residing on the land. Wisconsin worked to attract immigrants from the 1840s onward to farm its remaining arable land by issuing multilingual pamphlets, advertising in European newspapers, and placing a short-lived travel agent in New York City in 1853. Although the New York office was eliminated a few years later due to growing anti-immigrant sentiment, during its tenure it worked to attract German and Swiss immigrants. Many of the Swiss that settled in Wisconsin were from German speaking cantons — Swiss provinces similar to American states. Germans were the largest immigrant group in Wisconsin and the U.S. in the nineteenth century. Germans might have been drawn to Wisconsin because of the farmland available and its geographical similarities to central Europe and the Swiss might have immigrated here for the same reasons.