The Andover Creamery Company was founded in 1886 by seventy-six Andover residents to give local farmers a better way to market their butter, replacing small-scale farm production with a centralized creamery that used steam-powered churns, received cream from area farms, and shipped butter by nearby railroad to distant markets. Most stockholders bought one or two shares at twenty-five dollars each, raising four thousand five hundred dollars, and production began in 1887 in a two-story building measuring forty-eight feet by thirty feet, where a seven-horsepower steam engine drove rotating-drum churns through overhead shafts, pulleys, and belts. Two workers operated the equipment, while contracted cream gatherers collected cream from farmers and brought it to Andover Center, and farmers could also share in profits after stockholders received dividends. The company enforced strict rules governing cow health, milking, cleaning, storage temperatures, feeding, and the handling and collection of cream, and repeated violations could lead to a farm's cream being refused. In 1893 its butter won a bronze medal at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, and in 1903 the company produced 99,485 pounds of butter. Within a few years, however, falling dairy prices and competition from larger city milk processors weakened the business, and in 1915 the directors voted to dissolve the company and sell the land and building. The building was later enlarged and used for many years as a general store, gas station, and then an apartment building before it was removed in June 2000 for Route 6 intersection improvements.