Tillamook Creamery

The building at the north edge of Tillamook, on Highway 101, is long and plain under a single shed roof. Its walls are cedar and corrugated metal, and grasses, shrubs, and trees native to the Oregon coast are planted around it. The Seattle firm Olson Kundig designed it as a modern barn, with an exposed structure, concrete floors, and big windows that look out on the dairy country. Visitors enter beneath a mural of a Tillamook cow and pass Flower, whom the company calls its own award-winning show cow and its Chief Creamery Greeter. Entry is free. Most visitors take the self-guided route, which follows the dairy from the farm, through the factory, and on to the counter.

The gallery over the vats

The farm exhibit hall comes first. Some of the cooperative’s farmer-owners have worked Tillamook land for four generations, and the displays show how they keep their cows, with fitness trackers, extra-soft bedding, rolling back massagers, and prepared feed. The architects count 80 member families in the cooperative.

Upstairs, the viewing gallery overlooks the floor of the company’s flagship plant, where cheese is made and packaged. The company notes that packaging runs Monday through Saturday. The cheddar below will age anywhere from three months to five years. A small theater shows short films about how Tillamook products are made. At the end of the gallery is the sample counter, where the company changes the cheeses so that a repeat visitor tastes something new. Overhead hangs Floating Loaves, a sculpture by Olson Kundig modeled on the 40-pound Mother Loaf. Children look for six hidden figures of Tillie, the company’s cow mascot, and line up for photographs behind the wheel of the Tillamook Yum Bus. The building has hearing loops, and the info desk lends sensory kits with noise-reducing headsets and a squeezable toy loaf.

Visitors who want a guide can book the Tour + Tasting. A Brand Ambassador leads it through the gallery, and it ends with a flight of specialty cheeses that includes Maker’s Reserve, which the North Coast Food Trail says ages as long as 10 years. An early-entry version lets guests in before general admission. In the ice cream session, small groups join the sensory team as honorary members and taste test flavors with a Creamery Expert.

Curds at the counter

The Dining Hall downstairs serves a menu of American classics with cheese added, created by executive chef Josh Archibald. It includes a Double Cheddar Grilled Cheese, pizza, fried cheese curds, and wine and beer from the Pacific Northwest. The covered patio outside was sized for summer, when the architects say as many as 18,000 people a day come through. Pets may wait there but are not allowed indoors. The ice cream counter scoops large servings and sometimes sells new flavors before they reach stores. Its one non-dairy choice is a fruit sorbet. Fresh cheddar curds are sold only here, at the Tillamook Market in the Portland airport, and seasonally online, because they lose their freshness quickly. When the building opened, the market sold everything from water bottles to Pendleton blankets.

A small two-masted ship appears on every Tillamook package. It was added in 1966, when the cooperative redesigned its label. The ship has a heritage wall inside the building, and a replica of it stood in front of the creamery for decades.

A schooner from shipwrecks

Henry Wilson, for whom the Wilson River is named, is generally credited with bringing the first dairy cows into the Tillamook Valley in the early 1850s. The grass stayed green nearly all year, and the herds soon gave more milk than the settlers could use. According to the county historical marker, by 1854 they were making butter and cheese in quantities large enough to sell on commission in Astoria and Portland. Getting them to market was the problem. There was no passable road over the Coast Range, and commercial traders refused to call at the bay because of its difficult entrance.

The Oregon Encyclopedia says the settlers began building their own vessel in September 1854, fearing starvation as their provisions ran low. The company’s history describes two failures first. One was a washed-up schooner called Rogers, sailed by two English sailors who wandered into town, which wrecked returning from its first trip. The other was the sloop McEwing, which drifted into a nearby slough, was salvaged, and later ran aground and broke up. The third boat was assembled from other wrecks. A British frigate called Shark supplied the hardware, and another lost vessel supplied the canvas. The company gives her length as 38 feet. She was finished on December 29, 1854. The historical marker records her as the first ship built in Tillamook County and the first registered ship in Oregon Territory.

The company’s account says George Scott named the boat on January 1, 1855: “As we look to the east early in the morning, we see a beautiful, bright star ascending. As we all look at this sturdy craft, we hail it as the blessing of a new day in Tillamook County. We therefore name this schooner the Morning Star of Tillamook.”

The launch went badly. In Laura Niederhofer’s account for the Oregon Encyclopedia, the settlers greased the skids with estuary mud, and the hull would not move. They sacrificed a steer to make tallow, and the Morning Star sailed on January 5, 1855. The company’s version says there was no grease at all and that the boat sat on the skids for four days. She carried tons of dairy products and seafood through stormy water to Astoria and Portland and returned safely with supplies. She served the county for a year and a half. She was then sold to pay one owner’s debt, passed through Astoria and Olympia hands, and was wrecked in the Strait of Juan de Fuca in 1860.

In February 1959, county volunteers began building the Morning Star II for the Oregon Centennial. She was finished in late July and sailed out of Tillamook Bay with six tons of cheese, skippered by Axel Anderson of Bay City. She followed the old route to Astoria and up the Columbia and Willamette rivers. She reached the Centennial Exposition in Portland on August 22, 1959, in time for Tillamook County Day, and crowds toured her deck and ate free cheese samples. Afterward she came home and went on display at the creamery. In 1992 she was replaced by a smaller-scale replica built by master shipwright Richard Miles of Aberdeen, Washington. The company has described its replica as full-size. In 2026 the cooperative took the replica down. It said the boat was no longer structurally sound after several decades of coastal weather and that the space would make room for something new.

Ten creameries, ten dollars each

Cheese traveled better than butter. Archie Satterfield’s history of the cooperative counts three dairies in the area in 1853. By 1856, Indian Agent William R. Raymond recorded making the first vat of cheese in the county. The sources give different names and dates for the first commercial cheese. The Oregon Encyclopedia credits Merriman Foland with it in 1889. The Oregon History Project names Merriman Folen and Bob Richards and says their first attempt that year was inedible, though within a few years they had a small, successful operation. The encyclopedia gives two years for the first factory. One entry says Portland entrepreneurs Thaddeus “T.S.” Townsend and Harry Ogden started one in 1893, and that Townsend drove several dozen cattle over the Coast Range to supply it. Another entry dates Townsend’s factory to 1894 and notes that ten years later his cheese won the first national prize at the St. Louis World’s Fair.

To run the factory, Townsend brought in Peter Duncan McIntosh. Tami Parr’s account says McIntosh was head cheesemaker at a plant in Woodland, Washington. The Oregon History Project says he was a Canadian immigrant who had learned the craft in Ontario and was persuaded to settle in the county in 1894. McIntosh is credited with giving local farmers a foolproof cheddar recipe, and the company calls him the “Cheese King of the Coast.” In the early 1930s he explained the logic to reporter Dean Collins: “You could store your cheese and wait for the boat without any danger of losing out through your product spoiling, as butter might spoil—for remember there weren’t the cold storage facilities in those days that there are now.”

By the turn of the century more than three dozen cheese factories were operating in the county. On February 13, 1909, at 9:05 a.m., the Secretary of State filed articles of incorporation for the Tillamook County Creamery Association. The Oregon History Project says ten factories joined, agreeing to a standard based on McIntosh’s method. The company says each creamery put in $10. Carl Haberlach managed sales and served as manager until 1944. Fred Christensen inspected every block of cheese. The railroad reached Tillamook in 1911. The cooperative stamped its name on every cheese and told buyers to “Look for Tillamook on the rind.” It began advertising nationally in 1918, and by the early 1930s it was selling more than 7 million pounds of cheese a year across the western states and Alaska. During both world wars, federal contracts sent millions of pounds of the cheese overseas.

From a cheese store to a barn

After World War II, the four largest plants in the area merged to form the Tillamook Cheese and Dairy Association. They were the Holstein, Tillamook, Mapleleaf, and Cloverleaf. In 1949 the new association opened a large cheesemaking plant beside the highway, and travelers on 101 soon began stopping there. Oregon Coast Magazine dates the first visitor center to that year. Olson Kundig says the old center grew piecemeal beginning in the 1950s. TCCA spokeswoman Tori Harms said the first accommodations were simple: restrooms, a small cheese store, and guided tours. On the company’s website, a visitor named Kym remembers childhood trips in the 1960s: “back then the tour was down on the factory floor.”

The 1960s also split the industry. The cheese and dairy association broke from the creamery association in a bitter dispute over marketing Grade A milk. Families and farmers took sides, and at one point a small homemade bomb damaged the home and car of TCCA head Beale Dixon. Both groups kept selling cheese under the Tillamook name until January 1, 1969, when, after years of litigation, they reorganized as a single Tillamook County Creamery Association.

In 1968 the company built a special entrance where visitors watched cheesemaking through windows. A 1979 expansion produced a visitor center that was remodeled over the next 38 years. It gained a gift shop, a dining area and kitchen, an enclosed atrium patio, and an upstairs observation deck, and it had its last makeover in 2003. The cooperative announced in 2016 that it would tear the center down. While the new building went up, a temporary center operated across the parking lot. The smell of waffle cones met visitors at its door, and recorded mooing filled the main hall as children pushed buttons to hear the sounds a cow makes. CEO Patrick Criteser said the visitor center drew crowds as large as Seattle’s Space Needle.

The temporary center closed on June 19, 2018, and the new Tillamook Creamery opened at 8 a.m. the next day, after a year and a half of construction by Hoffman’s subsidiary Precision Construction. The builder and the cooperative give its size as 38,500 square feet. Oregon Coast Magazine gives 42,800. Tom Kundig, the design principal for its architecture, said the firm wanted “a rational, straightforward building that is true to the experience and history of the farmers who make up the Tillamook Cooperative.”