Churning Into History -- Darigold Creamery Brings Issaquah `A Sense Of Place, A Pride Of Place'

ISSAQUAH

The butter-yellow brick building bustles with workers in sterile white smocks and rubber boots who inspect the milk from a daily parade of tanker trucks. A 130-foot wall mural depicts dairy production at a time when barges on Lake Sammamish transported 10-gallon milk cans. There's a hydrant nearby painted with the black-and-white pattern of a Holstein cow.

The Darigold Creamery has churned its way into this city's history as a lasting reminder of the cow country that once existed here.

The quaint creamery even persuaded one resident, Micki Ryan, to move to Issaquah.

"Any town that has a dairy plant . . . I thought was just great," said Ryan, president of Main Street Issaquah, a downtown-revitalization committee. "It signified a sense of place, a pride of place."

That pride led to the wall-mural project in 1995 in which three artists were commissioned to paint the scene.

The creamery was built in 1909 as Northwestern Milk Condensing, when dairy farms lined Lake Sammamish and dotted the Snoqualmie Valley. In Issaquah, the largest dairy farm was the Pickering farm.

In 1929, dozens of mothers sent in pictures of their children for a photo contest in which a "Butter Boy" was chosen for the company's advertising campaign.

The milk company changed hands and names several times before Darigold bought the plant in 1952. It now churns out such products as butter, sweet cream, sour cream, cottage cheese and yogurt. Darigold plants in other local cities produce milk.

"The length of time we've been here, you sort of become a landmark," said Joe Portmann, plant manager.

Although more than 20,000 drivers pass by each day on Front Street, most know little about the dairy's history or what happens behind the yellow walls.

And while residents see the finished products of this butter and cheese factory on their dinner tables, few know how much work it takes to get there.

"The perception is that it's not a very large facility," Portmann said.

The plant, as sterile as a hospital, has a labyrinth of overhead metal pipes that carry milk from tanks into various rooms and conveyor belts that shuffle along cubed butter and containers of yogurt.

About 100 employees, wearing hair and beard nets, keep the plant going 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Even the trucks don't stop; 20 to 30 tankers roll in each day, Portmann said.

Vern Anderson, who retired from the creamery in 1991 after working 45 years as a maintenance engineer, remembers the nonstop production schedule.

"The cows never quit," Anderson said, laughing. And the creamery workers didn't, either. Anderson added: "There was always something going. You never shut the door completely, even on the holidays."

Anderson was around long enough to see major changes in the 1970s, such as the making of yogurt and the installation of the new metal churns in the 1970s, a long-awaited switch from the tedious hand-cranking wooden churns.

"They only made one flavor (of yogurt). I think it was strawberry," Anderson said. Yogurt sales didn't pick up until there were more flavors.

Darigold is more than just a butter and cheese factory. It whips up a team of volunteers during community events, such as the annual Salmon Days festival. Creamery workers lug out hundreds of milk crates for people to watch the parade inch down Front Street. Darigold also sponsors a "trout pond" at the festival where kids can fish for free.

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Creamery production

Butter: 400,000 pounds a day.

Yogurt: 40,000 pounds a day.

Cottage cheese: 45,000 pounds a day.

Regular sour cream: 35,000 pounds a day.

Nonfat sour cream: 19,000 pounds twice weekly.

Condensed sweet cream: 175,000 pounds a week.

One churn produces 14,500 pounds of butter an hour; the other produces 8,000 pounds an hour.

Product cooler room: 10,000 square feet.

Butter cooler: 11,700 square feet.

Total warehouse facility: 35,000 square feet. Source: Darigold