Millerville: Minnesota's most buttery town

MILLERVILLE, Minn. -- Minnesota farm towns seem to have similar characteristics: a quaint main street, a tractor dealer, a baseball field. And in the case of Millerville -- a whole, lotta butter.

The town's 120-year-old co-op creamery, which also includes a hardware store, groceries and a mechanic all in the same building, is one of the few of its kind left in the entire country.

And it takes a village to keep things running this smoothly. There are more than 400 co-op members, and not all of them live in town.

"We've got Alaska, Montana, Florida, California," said general manager Deidre Hubbard. "It's very unique to have that kind of support coming from all over the country."

It's also unique to keep a butter business going since William McKinley was president. Ed Harren was a Millerville butter maker in the 1950s. He returned for a walk down memory lane.

"It's different. It's different," Harren said. "I think it's wonderful. It's really changed nice."

Eric Hubbard is the current butter maker. It takes his crew about three days to make one batch. Day one is pasteurization, when the creamery fogs up so much you can't see a foot in front of your face. Day 2 is all about the churn. And day 3 is packaging.

They are bricks of butter, but in this town, they might as well be bricks of gold. Each brick weighs a pound.

Visitors can watch the entire process. Sweet corn season is when they like to "spread the word." An historic, yet small creamery that still has big dreams.

We're at 32,000 pounds. We'd love to get to 350,000 pounds," Hubbard said. "We want to be all over the state and maybe one day, even nationwide.

Millerville makes batch butter that's sold in different parts of the state.