Gruyere's Cheesemakers
David Birmingham draws on the private papers of an 18th-century Swiss cheese farmer to recreate a world whose business sophistication and economic arrangements cut across the context of the rustic joys of an Alpine lifestyle.
On July 28th, 1800, the small mountain burgh of Chateau d'Oex was burnt down in a fire that so lit up the night sky that it could be seen right across the Swiss plain in the city-state of Neuchatel. Twenty-five large wooden houses, the homes of fifty families, went up in flames. They had been clustered on the castle hill in order to cling to medieval tax exemptions, this despite the risk of fire which had already struck twice before, in 1664 and 1641. The castle, long since transformed into a church, burnt with the rest. Regulations about using lanterns rather than candles in cow byres, and instructions to keep full pails of water on doorsteps, had availed nothing in the dry heatwave. Shingled roofs caught fire from the sparks and only the stone rectory was saved. The Town Hall was burnt out and, it is alleged, the archives were incinerated. Historians, therefore, have to reconstruct the history of the cheese-makers in this distinctive commune of Upper Gruyere from fragmentary private papers.
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