Milk left this ranch for eighty-seven years straight — by pail, by bottle, by sled, by truck — through four generations of one family.
Milk was sold off this place from 1908 until 1995. Say that out loud: eighty-seven years of twice-a-day milkings, and, as the family history puts it, “there was no such thing as vacations, as no one was around to milk the cows.”
It started with Arthur Purdy's dairy — the first at Eureka — and passed to his son Lynn, who with Jessie ran it under the name painted big on the barn: MEADOW HOME DAIRY. Jessie remembered the whole arc in a newspaper interview years later: “We started out, like I say, with pails and then bottles and then we got milking machines and even delivered with a sled.”
Lynn and Jessie's son Dale took it from there. He built the silo in 1952 — it's still standing in our photographs — baled fifty-pound bales the kids hauled and stacked, and when paper milk cartons came in during the 1950s, Vic Peltier hauled the milk to Equity Supply in Kalispell and brought back his load bottled in square containers. From 1962 the family sold whole milk, skim, and fresh cream straight off the farm — folks drove out and picked it up in gallon jars, for twenty-three years.
There was no such thing as vacations, as no one was around to milk the cows.— from the Purdy family history
Dale and Marie raised eight children on the dairy, and both drove a school bus from 1964 to 1982 — cows milked before the morning route — to support what they called their “farming habit.” Washing milk machines and jars was a chore that had to be done morning and night; everyone took their turn.
In 1995, Joe and Rita Purdy — the fourth generation — bought the place and made the turn from dairy to beef cattle. The milking stopped. The work didn't. The herd you can watch on our live cams today grazes the same meadows that fed the milk cows for nearly a century.