The Dairy in Turner Hall serves traditional ice cream flavors such as rocky road and experiments with original flavors, including Fear the Turtle, Star Spangled Explosion and more. The ice cream parlor will move to Stamp Student Union in spring 2014.
From plain vanilla to Fear the Turtle and Midnight Madness, the Dairy has served dozens of traditional and original flavors in Turner Hall since 1924.
But nearly 90 years after it first opened, the Dairy will close at the end of this semester and move to Stamp Student Union in the spring to increase visibility and make way for an expanded Visitor Center in Turner Hall.
The Dairy will take over part of the Baltimore Room by the food court, said Marsha Guenzler-Stevens, Stamp director. It will be located in the front left corner of the room, replacing the high-top tables there, she said.
Officials hope that moving the Dairy from near Rossborough Inn on Route 1 to Stamp will improve the shop’s business, Dining Services spokesman Bart Hipple said.
“More people will walk by and be more likely to get it,” Hipple said. “For us, the Dairy is not central to where people are walking or driving. It isn’t really a lunchtime destination, but a place to go for a treat.”
The move has created concern for some students who use the Baltimore Room on a regular basis as a place to eat, talk and catch up on work.
“I normally study in the Baltimore Room,” said Elise Benjamin, a junior dietetics major. “So having another store there that would attract people wouldn’t be something I would like, but it would improve their business, I’m sure.”
Guenzler-Stevens said she doesn’t expect the addition of the Dairy to impair the flow of traffic or take away seating in Stamp.
“We have obligations to students and to visitors, but also to food vendors,” Guenzler-Stevens said. “We will not sacrifice the number of seats in that area that it intends to serve.”
Employees aim to maximize seating in the area by using a small amount of space for the parlor, Hipple said.
When the parlor reopens in the spring, it won’t be the first time the Dairy has served ice cream in Stamp. In the ’80s, Dory’s Sweet Shop on the ground floor of the student union served the Dairy’s specialty flavors, said Anne Turkos, university archivist.
Turkos said that while she understands the rationale for moving the Dairy to increase business and visibility, she’s sad to see the university lose part of its history.
“For me, the Dairy represents a very important part of our agricultural and land-grant heritage,” Turkos said. “We’ve won awards for ice cream, and it makes us a well-known institution in the area. I’m sad to see it go away from its historical home.”
Turner Hall has undergone several architectural changes since the Dairy opened. When it was first constructed, the building looked like a factory, Turkos said. Former university President Harry Clifton “Curley” Byrd decided he didn’t like the look of the building, so he insisted the university build a brick facade to fit in with the look of the campus.
“If you stripped all that brick away, you would find the original look,” Turkos said. “The building is a fascinating part of our history.”
Until a renovation in the ’90s, the original Dairy had paneled walls and was “much darker and gloomier than what we see today,” Turkos said. But the renovation transformed the shop into a bright, sunny place with white painted walls, making the Dairy look “much more like an ice cream parlor.”
Between renovations and changes, faculty, students and campus visitors have continued to line up at the Dairy to try rich, unique flavors, which used to be produced by the university’s dairy science program and are now made by the Dining Services bakery staff. World-renowned ice cream expert Wendell Arbuckle, a dairy sciences professor from 1949 to 1972, encouraged the university community to sample watermelon, sweet potato, cantaloupe and more.
In recent years, the Dairy has experimented with university-themed flavors such as Mochalotta Mote, named after former President Dan Mote, and the 2008 Maryland Day special Explore Our World, a mix of vanilla ice cream, sprinkles and M&Ms.
Even the simple flavors are a sweet treat, Turkos said.
“Plain old vanilla is wonderful,” she said. “And the strawberry is terrific.”
When the Dairy reopens in the spring, the new location will sell ice cream floats, cones, cups and milkshakes. Other products sold in the Turner Hall shop will appear in Stamp’s Union Shop, Hipple said.
Hipple hopes the move will promote the university’s history and benefit the Visitor Center, which will expand to include a larger gathering space.
A more central location will make the Dairy more popular with students, sophomore early childhood education major Danika Scott said.
“I don’t even know where the Dairy is. I would go if I knew where it was,” Scott said. “They will have more traffic. So for them to [relocate to] Stamp, I would go.”
