When I began researching “The Big Cheese” in 1998, scrolling microfilm was the only way to do a newspaper search. You then printed from the reader, sometimes printing in sections to later piece together. As the internet grew I was able to add a few additional articles to the story, but one detail eluded me – WHERE in Appleton, Outagamie, Wisconsin was this massive cheese built?

This past weekend, a comment on my post, The Largest Cheese in the World! prompted me to take another look. And much to my dismay, the answer was right there all along. To be fair, the new articles I was finding repeated the location over and over, hitting me in the head with the fact. 

I now know that the cheese was manufactured at the Charles Clack warehouse. The warehouse located at 715 Clark Street (pre-1925 address number change), was “a brick and concrete cabbage store house” built in 1910 and measured “30 by 80 feet, one and one-half stories high. The walls are of concrete, brick-lined, and the floor of cement.”¹

The Sanborn map tells us that there were six buildings on this block of Clark Street, four dwellings, and an office with a lumber shed behind it. The cabbage warehouse was right at the railroad sidetrack, making it the perfect place to create, store and then load a massive cheese.

In the upper left corner of the photograph is a home with a very distinctive roofline, while the home visible in the upper right-hand corner has a more traditional roofline. The home visible on Division Street is the home that Charles Clack, his wife Anna, and their daughter Edith were living in when the 1920 U.S. Federal Census was enumerated on 3 Jan 1920. This home, now numbered 414 North Division Street, still stands, and while the treeline has changed over the past 100+ years, the house is still visible from the warehouse site. According to the Property Search Report at appleton.org, the home was built in 1900 and has a total living area of 2,234 sq. ft. It does look as though a dormer has been added to the south side of the attic as it is not visible in the 1911 photograph.

In the map, you can clearly see what was once four lots moving south down Clark from Packard. The southernmost house was built in 1870. The house next to it was built in 1879. Then a vacant lot just before the home fronting on West Packard, which was built in 1885. The home has a wrapped porch as shown in the Sanborn map.

One item has now been removed from my to-do list! The question remaining is, how many times did I park at the Post Office or drive through to drop a letter in the mailboxes visible below? So many days as I wondered where the cheese had been built, I was right across the street.

SOURCES:

1. “Two New Buildings Nearing Completion,” Appleton Evening Crescent, 11 Oct 1910, Tuesday Evening, p. 1, col. 5; digital images, Newspapers.com (www.newspapers.com : accessed 10 Oct 2024). ↩︎