Original Dairy Queen

Answer: J.F. "Grandpa" McCullough who developed the soft-serve ice cream referred to cows as the Queen of the Dairy business. So I guess "Dairy Queen" seemed like a natural choice.

I love little bits of history like that.

On with the story:

Sherb Noble opened the first Dairy Queen in June 1940. That first DQ was strictly a walk-in location because it was squeezed between two other buildings at the time and there was very limited street parking. It closed in the early 1950s.

But how did Noble get hooked up with McCullough? He was already buying supplies for his traditional ice cream stores when McCullough developed soft-serve. Then in 1938 they teamed up to to try the new soft-serve ice cream at Noble's "Sherb’s Ice Cream" store in Kankakee, IL to see if the public liked it.

They offered it as a special "All you can eat for $0.10" price. 1,600 people showed up and packed the store and the sidewalk and down the block. Over 75 years later Dairy Queen is still going strong, so it's safe to say the public loved soft-serve ice cream!

But it still took a couple of years before the first store opened because they needed to find a freezer system that could handle mass production at the store level. By 1940 they had found a working freezer system and soon after that this store opened.

It is located at Chicago St. and Ohio St., just before Ottawa St. angles off to the left.

In November 2010 the Joliet City Council granted local landmark status and in May 2011 there was a presentation of historical plaque for the building. The building was built in 1895.

This historic marker was embedded in the sidewalk in front of the entrance to the building in 2011, it says:

On this site and in this building, erected ca. 1895, the world's first Dairy Queen store opened on June 22, 1940.

Soft serve ice cream was unknown before its inception in Kankakee, Illinois in 1938 by John Fremont "Grandpa" McCullough (1871-1963), and his son Alex McCullough. They convinced friend and customer Sherwood D. ("Sherb") Noble to offer the product in his ice cream store in Kankakee. The new treat was extremely popular and Noble and the McCulloughs went on to open the first Dairy Queen store right here. Since that humble beginning in 1940, the Dairy Queen system has grown to more than 5,900 locations in the United States, Canada and 17 additional countries around the world.

Photo(s): 2016, 2022