This was the early commercial district of Minden about 1918, roughly a dozen years after its 1905 debut. Business was booming as you can see by the crush of cars, including that svelte roadster at right.
The upstart “Minden Creamery” (as it sometimes was casually called) was launched in 1908 at 1620 Water Street, and by mid-1914 had put its competitor, the older Carson Valley Creamery, out of business.
The new butter facility actually had a longer and fancier formal name: officially, it was the “Minden Butter Manufacturing Company.” Principals in this new creamery business included H.F. Dangberg, Jr. — the same luminary behind the creation of Minden itself — William Dressler, Fritz Schacht, and Richard Fricke. With John Sattler as its first butter-maker, some said this new creamery produced the “finest butter in the West.”
Privately-held when the organization first began, Minden Butter Mfg. eventually morphed into the Minden Co-Op Creamery in 1946. The creamery’s doors finally closed in 1961, however. Time stands still for no man, woman, or dairy!
But as for the “Minden Creamery” token shown above, helpful research by dedicated token collectors indicates that this came from a different creamery altogether — in Minden, Nebraska!
What a fascinating coincidence: two creameries with similar names operating at roughly the same time, in two different widely-separated towns both called Minden!
All of which got us to pondering: just how many Mindens are there? The short answer: at least seven here in the United States alone!
There’s a southern Minden touting its location “in the piney woods of 
northwest Louisiana,” founded in 1836 by a lawyer who later ran off to California during the Gold Rush.
There’s rural Minden, Texas, named by a homesick former resident of the LouisianaMinden, who found himself in Texas about 1849 and affixed the name to a spot along an early stagecoach line.
A bit farther north, Minden, Iowa sprang up beside the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad and the imagination-tickling “Keg Creek.” Settled by German immigrants, this Minden is said to have been named for the former hometown of many of its “industrious settlers.”
Minden, New York, formed in 1798, similarly took its name from its namesake in Germany. This New York town once was touted as a “gateway to the west,” thanks to its prime location adjoining both a railroad and the Erie Canal. Today the town covers nearly 33,000 acres and is divided into six smaller hamlets, one charmingly named “Mindenville.”
Not to be left out of the mix: Minden, West Virginia, named (once again) for old Minden Germany; it’s said that the name was picked by an early West Virginia coal-mining official. Sadly, the spot today is a Superfund clean-up site, with nearly a third of residents said to suffer from some type of cancer. It was annexed into the neighboring city of Oak Hill in 2015, but remains on the books as a “census-designated place.”
And then there’s our creamery-twin Minden, Nebraska — home to the token that prompted this virtual journey. Originally a plot of empty land “without a single inhabitant or building,” this town of Minden was voted into existence in 1876 by nearby homesteaders, stripping county seat-hood from railroad-dominated Lowell to the north by their vigorous exercise of democracy.
Our very own Minden, Nevada got its name from H.F. Dangberg, Jr., who envisioned a well-ordered community surrounding a town square (today’s grassy Minden Park), and named it (of course) after the old German town near his father’s birthplace.
If these widely-scattered Mindens begin to sound like a road trip in the making, one couple has already blazed the way! Check out this great story from the Record-Courierabout Terri and Chuck Luettgerodt of Minden, Nevada, who set out in a Volkswagen van in 2017 to visit “every Minden they could.”
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Many thanks to noted Nevada historian and long-time token collector Michael Fischer and token experts Jack Haddock and Leroy Felch for their kind research and help in identifying the Nebraska “Minden Creamery” token, and their great suggestions and additions for this article!
#SierraHistory #CarsonValleyNV #whyCV
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