Creamer's Dairy - Fairbanks, Alaska - Dairy Creameries on Waymarking.com

"This is the only group of pioneer dairy farm buildings surviving in the interior of Alaska. This was the first horizontally organized dairy farm established in the interior of Alaska, and was operated by members of one family from about 1903 until operations ceased in 1965.

The dairy was established by Charles T (or F) Hinckley, a native of Rockford, Illinois, where he was born in 1872. Hinckley had brought ten cows to Nome in 1900. Planning to capitalize on the human needs of those caught up in the gold fever, he set up a dairy in that Gold Rush boom town. In the spring of 1903 he gave up this enterprise in Nome and transported his family and three best cows 1280 miles to Fairbanks on board the first Yukon River steamer of the season, selling milk en route to pay for the trip. The first location of his dairy in Fairbanks was in the camp itself, with transfer to the present location soon afterwards. He soon encountered and hired Charles A. Creamer, a 14-years old member of a pioneer family that also had recently arrived in Fairbanks. Creamer later would marry into Hinckley's family and succeed him as owner-operator of the dairy farm.

Fairbanks was a Gold Rush boom town. Thousands of miners overran the forest-covered hills and sluiced the valleys for the precious yellow metal, as they had done during the preceding seasons at Dawson and at Nome. Fairbanks quickly became a wide-open town. Dance halls, saloons, gambling emporiums, and expensive restaurants, vied with each other to pafct the miners from their gold nuggets. Hinckley's dairy business thrived and expanded. Fairbanks was, however, a Gold Rush camp with a difference. While many of the goldmining camps of the period were little more than temporary way stations of life for the squadrons of gold seekers, Fairbanks from its start was more of a family and home town than were the other gold-precipitated communities of the Northland. Some of the men who had pioneered the Forty Mile, Circle, Dawson, and Nome, came to Fairbanks, took steady jobs, and settled down, giving the town a tone of comparative moral sobriety. This early developed into a permanent community and its inhabitants early developed the amenities of community life, while other gold camps were primarily transitory in their existence and organization.

During the initial boom milk sold in Fairbanks for one dollar a quart, though rumor in Seattle had the price at five dollars. Even at this price, dairying was untried and speculative in interior of Alaska. All hay, grain and mill feed was imported from Seattle, transported 2500 miles on the Pacific Ocean and the Bering Sea to the head of river navigation at St. Michael, then by sternwheeler steamers another 1150 miles to Fairbanks on the banks of the Chena River. Consequently, hay sold for $120 per ton, oats, $140, and mill feed for $120. In addition to the cost of feed, farm help was another pressing problem in operating a dairy. Men out of work hired on as milkers, stablemen and deliverymen, only to desert their jobs at each new rumor of a gold strike. One of the first employees hired by Hinckley was fifteen years old Charles A. Creamer.

Young Creamer had arrived in Juneau with his mother and two sisters in 1897. They had followed his father and uncle, who had preceeded them and were making their stake from the Gold Rush by working as freighters and teamsters along the Chilkoot Trail. The family came from Redding, California, where Charles had been born in 1889. This family was representative of the westward moving "manifest destiny" frontier American. In the Eighteenth Century the family ancestors had been in the Connecticut Militia in the Revolutionary War, moved to War Bonus lands in Ohio after the War, moved on several generations later to Colorado and California, and made the last big migration to Alaska in 1897.

Charlie Creamer's uncle was killed in a shipboard explosion during the Yukon Gold Rush. His father moved his family successively to Skagway, Dyea, Dawson, and, in 1904, to Fairbanks, where Charlie went to work, on a sometime basis, for Hinckley. The family lived that first winter in a tent, and the Creamer children attended a school in a structure where the Northward Building is now. Charlie attended school irregularly. He Itook advantage of every opportunity to work on the trail with his father, freightering to Dyea, shipping to Tacoma, bringing cattle in from the states over the White Pass Railway, and barging them down the Yukon. He stated that he spent much time as chambermaid for cattle and horses, cleaning up barns and putting in fresh sawdust. He worked occasionally for Hinckley, and continuously with cattle and horses.

After service in World War I, Charlie traveled around the mid-west, still in uniform, and then back to central Alaska. Hinckley's sister-in-law, Rosanna Goldman, operated a grocery store in Fairbanks. She and Creamer were married in Tacoma, Washington, in 1920. Her parents lived in Tacoma, and she disposed of her Fairbanks store, and the couple operated a chicken farm near Tacoma from 1920 to 1927. Feeling the beginnings of the depression in 1927, they took a large shipment of chickens and eggs to Fairbanks, where they relocated. They sold their cargo for from ten to sixty times the price available in Tacoma. Creamer went: to work for his brother-in-law, who wished to retire from the dairy farm. Creamer purchased the farm assets for $6,000, which he borrowed from a Fairbanks merchant, Billy McGrath.

About 1908 Creamer began helping Hinckley clear his fields for grain cultivation. He noticed and commented upon the spring bird migrations, and observed their return each spring as the clearing and cultivation continued. Following acquisition of the farm in 1927 he increased the attractiveness of the area to the migrating birds. He cleaned the barn daily and saved the sweepings primarily oats and barley to lay out in spring to attract the migranting birds. He never ceased to wonder that these tiny creatures would find their way back to his land each spring at the same time, coming from places half way round the globe.

In 1938 he built his big new modern barn, installing the latest in dairying equipment, and conttnued fcntil 1965 to provide fresh dairy products, including ice cream, to central Alaska, Mrs. Creamer died in October 1965, when Mr. Creamer was 76 years of age. A few months after her death, he sold off his herd of 101 cows for the meat and closed down the dairying operation. He had outlasted all his competition by working at his craft, together with his wife, seven days a week without a vacation for 38 years. He had made maximum utilization of all the products and by-products of the farm. But the loss of his wife and partner, coupled with advancing age, drew the curtain on this unique enterprise and upon the dairy farming of this unique family. First Hinckley, and then the Creamers,, for sixty-one years in Fairbanks, worked productively in a small family enterprise now overtaken by changing times.

In 1969 the State of Alaska purchased all the Creamer land that had been the spirtng;:visiting grounds for the birds. In 1949 Mr. and Mrs. Creamer had given their only child, George Donald, an undivided 1/3 interest in their properties After selling the state the conservation acreage, the Creamers father and son sold the balance of the property, including the dairy buildings, to a group of Fairbanks businessmen.

Mr. Creamer was a Member of Pioneers of Alaska, Fairbanks Igloo #4. He spent the balance of his life in the Fairbanks Pioneer Home, where he died in December; 1975.

The major Creamer Dairy buildings still stand. They represent pioneering Tanana Valley agriculture and the "fairy godfather" to the migrating birds that still pause here each Spring in their flight North. This farm preserves physical evidence of the pastoral quality of life here during the recent but much different formative period of the Fairbanks community, of the Tanana Valley, and of central Alaska." - National Register Nomination form

The farm land and buildings are now owned by Alaska Department of Fish and Game and is operated as the Creamer's Field Migratory Waterfowl Refuge. It is open to the public with walking trails and blinds to observe the birds from.

Are tours available?: yes Does the Dairy Creamery have a website?: [Web Link] Type: Historical

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