Say Cheese October 2009

For the last 19 years I have called the Madison area home. But it took my flatlander uncle and my tornado alley parents roaming the back roads of this delightful dairy land to uncover a little slice of true Wisconsin heritage right under my nose.


The goldmine they discovered isn’t a mine—but it is almost underground. The Silver Lewis Cheese Co-op is in rural Monticello in Green County. It’s built into the side of a hilltop where it’s been producing cheese with milk from local farms since 1897.

Silver Lewis is known for its Brick and Muenster cheese. But this little operation can also be noted for quietly bridging a generation gap.

Even though I have sampled a number of their cheeses, it was only recently I planned my first trip to the factory store. That’s when I discovered that while I share a love of Silver Lewis Cheese with my parents, my ability to navigate my way to their hilltop was challenged by a distinct difference between my generation and my parents’. Somewhere between the two there have appeared Swiss-cheese-sized holes in my generation’s ability to travel this globe using the north and south poles as landmarks.

When I called my dad for directions he rattled them off without even pausing to think. “You head South and go through New Glarus on 69. You turn East onto County Road “F” and head into Monticello. Now there will be a pond over on the South side of the road so you go past that and through a couple of stop signs and the road curves around to the South again and then right after it turns back East “F” curves off to the South and “EE” goes on to the East so keep going East on EE. After a few miles you will see a junction sign for D. It goes north but the factory is right there on the south side of the road. Right over the crest of a hill, you can’t miss it.”

WHAT??!! Where do I turn right and left? I had to slowly translate each direction into terms I could manage to navigate at driving speeds.

I will tell you right now, I have never in my life given directions using north, south, east or west. How did my GPS generation become so directionally challenged while those before us apparently have some kind of built-in compass?

After a beautiful drive, I found myself sitting on the south side of the road in the tiny parking lot of Silver Lewis Cheese Coop feeling pretty proud of myself. It is just as they described. A no frills factory below an apparent home, with a hand painted “open” sign perched outside the swinging screen door leading to a loading dock and tiny retail counter. Workers were loading boxes on a pallet to be shipped to New York, while another worker handled huge blocks of bright yellow cheese for packaging. Another white cloaked worker took time to sell me my favorite Basil Muenster and a few chunks of the most delicious cheese you ever want to sample. The same cheese they’ve been making for a hundred years, long before GPS and satellite, right here on the south side of the road just south of Monticello.