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1953–2003 · the format the Walkerton store belonged to
The Walkerton Burger Dairy was one instance of an invention: before the 1950s, the Farmer's Exchange's history records, local dairies delivered milk to customers' homes; Jim Burger's stores inverted the system — a small convenience store where the customer came to the milk — and Burger Dairy was the first to sell milk in gallon jugs, the format the home-delivery bottle could not match. The stores sold milk and ice cream from the company's own processing, delivered within a hundred-mile radius of New Paris, and as they "sprouted up in local towns," home delivery faded across the region. That is the institution the 1974 case record touches in Walkerton: not a restaurant but the town's milk counter, open long hours, selling the township's own product back to it in gallon jugs — the mid-century successor, at chain scale, of the Keystone Creamery's 1892 start-up two articles above. The brand outlived the company by affection: thirteen years after the 2003 closing, Burger Dairy signs still hung outside convenience stores, ice cream parlors and one Elkhart County barn, and the Exchange found the following "loyal" — the dairy-store age remembered the way the saloon age is not.
Sources:
- Farmer's Exchange, 17 June 2016 (the delivery age and its end; the gallon-jug first; the hundred-mile radius; the surviving signs and the loyal following, thirteen years after the closing).