Mat Maid memories

Matanuska Maid is as much a part of the flavor of our community as the foods it produced in Alaska for more than 70 years.

Matanuska Valley Farmer’s Cooperative Association was formed to process the milk and produce coming from Valley farms in 1936. It provided fresh milk, cheese, eggnog, ice cream, cottage cheese and much more.

Generations of Alaska children grew up watching their mothers pull those distinctive red, white and blue milk cartons with the ice skater out of the icebox.

That was back when milk actually tasted good, Tyson Kroon said.

We posted a note on our Facebook page earlier this week asking readers to share their Mat Maid memories. That post was shared and combined, Valley residents shared hundreds of memories.

Ray Bouwens said his father’s first “job” was sweeping at the co-op.

Terri Farmer remembers that design with the iconic Mat Maid skater drawn by Dorthy Sheely in 1936, a local high school student who received $25 for her entry.

“I had one of the milk cartons framed when they changed the design in the late ’80s or early ’90s,” Farmer said.

Though Matanuska Maid ceased to exist in December 2007 after economic pressures forced the dairy to close, it remains an important part of the fabric of this community. It’s part of our community’s history. It’s part of our personal histories, too.

Kenda Huling remembers shopping there for dairy products, food for animals and hay.

“Loved it,” she wrote. “Sure will miss being reminded of happy memories as I passed the old building.”

Mat Maid’s roots stretch back to 1935 when the Alaska Rural Rehabilitation Corp. moved 202 families from the economically depressed Midwest to the Matanuska Valley.

They came site unseen to accept the federal government’s offer of 40-acre homesteads with the expectation that they would build a “colony” here.

Just five years after the operation began, it was selling bottled milk from the creamery to folks in Anchorage and processing 7,000 pounds of fresh milk daily. The creamery opened in a new space in Anchorage in 1964 in response to growing demand.

Left behind in Palmer were some of the creamery’s original buildings, some of the oldest in the city.

Some of the area’s pioneers who now live far away learned of our loss and shared their memories online, too.

For Norma Huff, Mat Maid is an echo from her past.

“So sad,” she wrote. “Hurts so deep that all the roots of my life (growing up) are disappearing more and more.”

Huff described growing up here as the best years of her life.

In those days, Huff said this was the kind of place where people cared about each other, where we helped each other.

Much has changed here. The fiery destruction of the Mat Maid warehouse this week has set us to reminiscing as a community about our childhood and about the Palmer colony’s early days.

But to Huff and anyone else who worries we lost our way, we say with certainty that kind, caring people remain the hallmark of the Mat-Su Valley.