Sugar City Sugar Beet Factory

Sugar City Sugar Beet Factory. . In August 1903, Mark Austin negotiated the purchase of a section of land here, the south half to be used as this town site and the north half, about 1/2 mile northeast, to be used for a sugar beet factory for the Fremont County Sugar Company. By October 1903, E.H. Dyer had contracted to build the $750,000 factor. Early in 1904, the company signed an additional contract with Dyer providing for the erection of an auxiliary plant at Parker, bringing the total to nearly $1 million. , On December 8, 1903, President Joseph F. Smith, elected president of the company, laid the cornerstone of the factory which processed 35,000 tons of beets the next fall. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints sent 3 chemists from Germany to teach the people how to make sugar. , Growing beets required very hard labor. Planting, cultivating, and digging were done with horses, but the difficult thinning, weeding, irrigating, toping, and loading were done by hand by the farmer and his family. In 1906 the company paid laborers and growers $3/4 million. The town grew and 20 businesses flourished here. , At the slicer in Parker, beet juice was extracted and pumped almost 6 miles away through a pipeline to the factory in Sugar City. The slicer was closed in 1913 because of difficulties incident to the extremely cold weather. Juice would freeze in the pipeline, and the water and beets would freeze in the flume. , Because of limitations of acreage and labor, the factory was closed in 1940 and 1941 but reopened for the last campaign in 1942. The factory was dismantled in 1947.