Tillamook Creamery

Tillamook Bay was dairy country almost from the start and nearly impossible to sell from. Overland, the trails over the Coast Range were too slow for anything that could spoil, and wrecks on the bar kept taking the ships that came for the butter. In the fall of 1854 the settlers stopped waiting, pulled timber and hardware from wrecks on the beaches, and built their own two-masted schooner, the Morning Star, finished on December 29 and the first ship registered in the Oregon Territory. It carried butter to Astoria and Portland for a year and a half before it was sold to pay one owner's debts. Its silhouette is the co-op's logo, and a replica stands beside the plant.

Butter spoiled; cheese traveled. In 1894 a Canadian cheesemaker named Peter McIntosh came to run a factory in the valley and taught the local makers the cheddar recipe that is still the basis of what is made here. In 1909 the valley's independent creameries put in ten dollars each to form the Tillamook County Creamery Association, so that every cheese sold under the county's name would be made the same way. The association later split into rival camps, dividing families, and came back together as a single cooperative only on January 1, 1969, after years in court.

The plant beside US-101 north of town has drawn travelers since it opened in 1949. The present visitor center, rebuilt in 2018, has a gallery over the production floor, a farm exhibit, a cafe, and a long line for ice cream. The co-op is still owned by its farm families, most of them in Tillamook County, and runs a second cheese plant in Boardman, east of the Cascades.