The Fairmont Creamery Company was incorporated as a stock company on March 29, 1884, by Wallace Wheeler and Joseph H. Rushton. This building served as the original office, while the creamery stood half a mile east of town. Beginning as a small part-time business, the company grew into one of the nation's largest food processors and was later known as Fairmont Foods. Its first product was butter, and by 1891 one hundred employees were making 7,000 pounds of butter daily. In the 1890s the company operated plants in Crete, Tobias, Friend, DeWitt, Fairbury, Geneva, Milford, and Hebron. Corporate offices moved to Omaha in 1907. In the twentieth century the company diversified into processing dairy products, eggs, poultry, vegetables, and snack foods. By 1959 Fairmont Foods ranked among the country's five hundred largest corporations. The company moved its headquarters to Houston in 1974, and in 1980 it became a wholly owned subsidiary of American Financial Corporation. From 1907 to 1968 the original creamery building served as a medical office for Doctors Sherman F. Ashby, who came to Nebraska in 1885, Albert A. Ashby, and Charles F. Ashby. It is listed in the National Register of Historic Places.