Tillamook: Cheese, Blimps, and the Largest Wooden Buildings in the World

Tillamook is a name most Americans know from the yellow blocks of sharp cheddar in the grocery aisle, but the town behind that brand has a history stranger and more layered than the cheese label suggests. Start with the dairy itself. The coastal valley here, kept mild and wet by Pacific weather systems, produces grass nearly year-round. Dairy farmers recognized this by the eighteen fifties. The Tillamook County Creamery Association was organized in nineteen oh nine by local farmers who wanted to pool resources and standardize quality. For over a century, that cooperative has been one of the most successful farmer-owned food brands in America.

But Tillamook's other claim to fame is enormous and wooden and sits just south of town. During World War Two, the United States Navy needed blimps, specifically K-class non-rigid airships that could patrol the Pacific coast hunting Japanese submarines. Blimps required hangars of extraordinary size. The Navy built Naval Air Station Tillamook, commissioning it in nineteen forty-two, and erected two massive wooden hangars to house the airship squadrons. Because wartime rationing made steel scarce, both structures were built entirely from Douglas fir timber.

The numbers are staggering. Each hangar is roughly one thousand and seventy-two feet long, nearly three hundred feet wide, and almost two hundred feet tall. They are among the largest wooden structures ever built. Six blimps could fit inside a single hangar. The station was decommissioned in nineteen forty-eight after the war ended. One hangar burned in nineteen ninety-two. The surviving structure, Hangar B, was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen eighty-nine and today houses the Tillamook Air Museum.

So Tillamook gives you two things that have no business existing in the same small coastal town: one of America's best-loved cheese cooperatives and one of the world's largest wooden buildings. The coast had its reasons for each.