Dari Mart Stores – 59 Years in Business

Celebrating 59 Years

 

This October marks 59 years since Dari Mart Stores first opened its doors in the Willamette Valley. The Gibson family is grateful to still serve our local communities from Albany to Cottage Grove decades later. Although our family was around and busy creating Lochmead Farms in the 1940s, it wasn’t until 1965 that great-grandpa Howard’s dream of selling his family’s products directly to the community was realized.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Avoiding any middlemen and selling right to our customers through Dari Mart Stores gave full control of all processes of Lochmead’s products from doing our own herd breeding, growing feed for our cows, the milking parlor, processing plant, packaging, and finally handing the final product directly to customers. Owning all aspects of the journey from cow to customer allows Dari Mart and Lochmead to ensure the quality and freshness of each product. Unlike many larger operations that draw their milk and cream from multiple locations miles away from their processing plant and final destinations, every drop of our milk comes from our herd in Junction City, Oregon, just 4 miles from our processing plant and 44 miles from our furthest Dari Mart Store. When we say fresh and local, we mean it—48 hours from cow to customer. 

 

 

A lot has changed in the last 59 years. Some notable national and global historical events since 1965:

  • 1968: The assassinations of MLK Jr and RFK.
  • 1969: Astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, Jr., become the first men to land on the Moon.
  • 1972: Richard Nixon’s Watergate
  • 1981: Ronald Reagan is inaugurated as the 40th president, Sandra Day O’Connor is sworn in as the first woman Supreme Court justice.
  • 1987: In a speech in Berlin, President Reagan challenges Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to ―tear down this wall‖ and open Eastern Europe to political and economic reform.
  • 1992: the end of the Cold War
  • 2001: Two hijacked jetliners ram the twin towers of World Trade Center in the worst terrorist attack against the U.S.; a third hijacked plane flies into the Pentagon, and a fourth crashes in rural Pennsylvania. More than 3,000 people die in the attacks.
  • 2005: Hurricane Katrina wreaks catastrophic damage on Mississippi and Louisiana.
  • 2008: Barack Obama becomes the first African-American to be elected President, with 52.8% of the vote.
  • 2016: Republican candidate Donald Trump, won the election to become the 45th president of the United States. With his populist campaign and slogan, “Make America Great Again,” Trump capitalized on widespread discontent among white working-class voters, targeting the Washington establishment, undocumented immigrants, and political correctness.
  • 2020: COVID-19 pandemic and BLM protests and riots occur across the globe and nation.
  • 2022: OpenAI launches ChatGPT, an AI chatbot opening the floodgates of artificial intelligence technology and advancements.

 

No matter the decade, Dari Mart Stores remains a part of the Willamette Valley communities as the place to meet a friend, buy your weekly Lochmead milk and ice cream, or emergency run for butter and baking soda.

 

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