Utah's pioneers wanted sugar long before they could make it. In the 1850s settlers shipped machinery from Liverpool and built a sugar house south of Salt Lake City, but they could not solve the chemistry of turning beets from alkali soil into granulated sugar, and the venture failed at great cost. The idea came back in the 1880s through Arthur Stayner, an English horticulturist who won a $5,000 bounty from the territorial legislature in 1887 for producing the first 7,000 pounds of marketable Utah sugar, made from sorghum at a plant in Spanish Fork. Stayner went on to study E. H. Dyer's beet sugar plant at Alvarado, California, the first successful one in the nation.
On September 4, 1889, the Utah Sugar Company filed incorporation papers in Salt Lake City. Wilford Woodruff, president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, backed the project, and the church raised capital with tithing funds and loans from several banks. Lehi won the factory by offering a 40 acre site and perpetual rights to a spring fed millpond. Construction began in December 1890 on a plant designed by the E. H. Dyer Company, with Elias Morris as company president, George Q. Cannon as vice president and Lehi's bishop, Thomas R. Cutler, as general manager.
The first sugar came out on October 15, 1891, and Cutler telephoned the Salt Lake Herald to announce it. About 20,000 pounds went north by Union Pacific, and Salt Lake confectioners turned some of it into candy. That first season lasted 58 days and turned roughly 10,000 tons of beets into 12,500 hundred pound bags. Every bag sold in Utah, but the money barely covered costs, and the company did not earn a profit until 1897. It was the first beet sugar factory in the Mountain West and the first to use irrigated beets.
Learning the crop
The factory depended on farmers who had never grown the crop. In 1891 the company signed contracts with 556 of them. George Austin planted the first seed that year on George Comer's farm in Lehi, and growers worked their rows with hand planters and hoes. The early advice was to irrigate only once or twice a season and skip the fertilizer, and the 1891 yield averaged just 5.3 tons an acre, worth about $24. Growers learned quickly. The 1893 crop reached 26,800 tons at nearly 10 tons an acre.
By 1897 a county promotional history reported that the Lehi plant sliced about 350 tons of beets every 24 hours through a campaign of roughly 130 days, running night and day. The beets came from about 3,500 acres within a 25 mile radius, and the company paid $4 a ton for beets that tested at least 12 percent sugar. Its pulp went into long silos and fattened 2,000 head of cattle a season. The same book listed Vineyard as a settlement of about 240 people, well within that 25 mile circle. Even then the business felt fragile against subsidized foreign sugar: "At the present time, however, the condition is critical."
Beets were hard on hands. Boys from Lehi and the surrounding villages thinned and hoed the fields in late spring and summer, from about 7 in the morning to 6 at night, for 50 cents a day. Older boys blocked the rows with hoes and younger ones thinned the plants by hand, and a good day covered 20 rows each 40 rods long. At harvest, from late September into October, older boys were let out of school for a two week beet vacation to top the beets by hand. Inside the factory, many of the men working two 12 hour shifts were local farmers.
At the present time, however, the condition is critical.Utah County: A Graphic Account, 1897
Juice by pipeline
Lehi's answer to distance was plumbing. Instead of hauling every beet across the county, the company built cutting stations that sliced beets near the fields and pumped the juice to Lehi. Springville's station opened in 1899, connected by the first such pipeline in the country. Bingham Junction followed in 1900 and Provo in 1901, the closest to the farms of Lake View and Vineyard. Spanish Fork's line ran 22 miles, the longest beet pipeline in the world. Each station could slice 350 tons a day, though the pipes eventually corroded and the system was abandoned.
In 1907 the Utah Sugar Company merged with two Idaho companies to form the Utah-Idaho Sugar Company, and by 1914 the church was its largest shareholder. New plants filled Utah County. A factory went up in Payson in 1913, and in 1916 a 1,000 ton factory opened at Spanish Fork using machinery from a closed plant at Nampa, Idaho. The Springville-Mapleton Sugar Company opened its own plant in 1918, and a cutting station operated at Pleasant Grove.
Worms, blight and war
The crop carried the seeds of its own collapse. Farmers planted beets on the same ground year after year, and the beet nematode, a soil worm, spread through the fields and cut yields while officials were slow to urge crop rotation. Then came curly top, a beet blight that struck hardest from 1919 to 1934. The Lehi factory, the mother plant of the Mountain West, made its last sugar in the 1924 season, and Payson closed about the same time. Lehi's machinery was taken apart, and some of it was still making sugar in Toppenish, Washington, into the 1960s.
Spanish Fork carried on, and so did the fieldwork. During World War II, when labor ran short, Japanese American internees from the Topaz camp volunteered for farm work in Utah County. A tent camp at Ninth South and Fourth East in Provo housed about 400 people, and local farmers hired them for their beet fields; the first seventeen young men arrived in May 1943. That October five local youths fired shotguns and rifles into the camp and wounded three workers, and only after the War Relocation board threatened to pull the workers did residents agree to protect them. In the fall of 1944 German and Italian prisoners of war replaced the Japanese American workers at a camp in Orem.
The war also ended the farm era along Vineyard's shore. Geneva Steel rose in 1941 on 1,600 acres beside Utah Lake, and by 1960 it employed about 30 percent of Utah County's workers, many of them former farmers. The Spanish Fork factory closed in 1952 after cheap cane sugar undercut the beet industry. In November 1978 Utah-Idaho stopped contracting with growers and put its last four factories up for sale, and in 1979 it left the sugar business entirely. That same year the old Lehi factory lot was sold to a trucking company. The tall smokestacks at Lehi and Spanish Fork still stand, and in 2002 the legislature named the sugar beet Utah's historic state vegetable.
From vineyardhistory.org/stories/sugar-beet-country/
