THERESA ‒ For over 100 years, the Widmer family has been crafting artisan cheeses in a small cheese plant along the banks of the Rock River in the small village of Theresa.
At the age of 18, John O. Widmer, the founder of Widmer’s Cheese Cellars, left his home in Switzerland and emigrated to Wisconsin where he learned the art of cheesemaking. While apprenticing at a cheese factory in Kekoskee he learned to make brick cheese, created by fellow Swiss immigrant John Jossi at a Dodge County cheese plant in Lebanon.
When Widmer set up shop in the small cheese plant, formerly the Riverside Cheese Factory, he decided that aged brick cheese would become the family’s signature cheese.
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