The headline: "Excellent Utah sugar." Deseret News, Oct. 17, 1891.
It was quite a procession that made its way from the Union Pacific Depot through downtown Salt Lake City. A yoke of oxen symbolically led the way, followed by three loaded drays.But the "honorees" were not people. They were bags of sugar, the first produced in Utah, on their way to merchants who sold them in short order to "almost a riot of people."
The Deseret News, noting the event a couple of days later, said the excellent sample provided for "Mr. T." by a sugar company stenographer proved Utah's sugar venture "can unhesitatingly be pronounced a success. . . . The status of this industrial establishment will not only be a benefit of itself to our commonwealth but will do much toward stimulating the inauguration of other branches of manufacture."
Samples of Utah sugar were sent to President Benjamin Harrison and other national leaders, some of whom sent back letters of appreciation.
The jubilation at Utah-produced sugar was prompted by more than just a collective sweet tooth. Sugar was an important commodity for the pioneering Mormons, a necessity to preserve foods for survival harvest to harvest.
Settlers scattered across the West had depended on sugar from the East, often at a high price. In the early days of settlement, three pounds of sugar went for $2 - a significant amount of money in pioneer terms.
Colonizer Brigham Young had promoted sugar production and had distributed seeds for sugar beets among his followers. He created the Agricultural and Manufacturing Society to prod such enterprises but died before a practical method was found to process sugar beet syrup.
In 1852, Young's successor, John Taylor, joined Elias Morris and other pioneer entrepreneurs to bring equipment from France in hopes of refining sugar. But the open kettle method that worked in France did not work in Utah.
Besides problems with equipment, the venture suffered crop failures in 1855 and 1856. In the end, the unsuccessful attempt cost its investors $150,000 and settlers continued to buy sugar from the East. The plant on 1100 East and 2100 South never produced any usable sugar but nevertheless left its legacy, as that area of the city became permanently Sugarhouse.
Again in 1887, the Utah Territorial Legislature provided $5,000 as a bounty to encourage Arthur Stayner to experiment with sugar production. The $5,000 was contingent on his producing the first 7,000 pounds of marketable sugar in the territory.
He set up a plant in Spanish Fork to extract brown sugar from sorghum cane. He went to Kansas to learn more about the process but was ultimately convinced that sorghum would not do well in the Great Basin, given the area's history of early frosts. Some molasses and heavy golden syrup were produced, but white sugar remained an import.
The organization of the Utah Sugar Co. in 1889 was the first step toward practical sugar production from beets. The project proceeded even when experiments with a "polariscope" showed very low percentages of sucrose and purity in Utah-grown beets.
Part of the incentive for investors (all of whom were also LDS Church leaders) was the federal government's offer of a 2-cents-per-pound bounty for all beet sugar produced anywhere in the country.
To help raise the capital for the Utah venture, Heber J. Grant, later president of the LDS Church, was called on a "mission" to encourage church members to invest in a proposed sugar plant in Lehi. Grant found that many members were beginning to feel there were enough potential businessmen now in the territory that the church should leave business to private concerns.
Ultimately, the church used $50,000 in tithing funds to help jump-start the business. Church leaders individually invested $250,000, and another 700 members chipped in $200,000 to purchase equipment and build the plant.
Lehi competed with American Fork for the budding business and when the plant was located in Lehi, there were hard feelings to the south that didn't heal for some time.
By October 1891, there were a dormitory for 50 workers, a three-story plant outfitted with equipment that had been brought by rail from the Midwest and six sheds 500-by-24 feet, ready and waiting for the sugar beets that were ripening in Utah County fields.
That first fall, company workers harvested 10,000 tons of beets. The refinery's equipment chugged into motion and sugar production was under way. On Oct. 15, James H. Gardner, the first sugar boiler, wrote that "such a crowd of citizens were present in the pan room while the boiling was going on that it was difficult to get around."
With the boiling complete, the crowd shifted its attention to the centrifugal equipment that spun off the molasses. Ed Dyer complained that he could "hardly get enough room to perform the washing."
When clear white sugar was passed out directly into the hands of the fascinated onlookers, there were shouts of "Hurrah!" and "Hosanna!" Utah was in the sugar business!
Within days of the arrival of the first sweet sacks in Salt Lake City, local confectioners were advertising "The first candy made of Utah sugar."
Sugar worker J.C. Jensen and his fiancee, Agnes Anderson, celebrated the successful first production by getting married immediately at the plant. The officiant was Thomas R. Cutler, general plant manager and local bishop. It was also Cutler who, during the first lean years of operation, provided scrip usable at the Lehi Cooperative Mercantile for workers who didn't always get regular paychecks. He was an official of the cooperative.
In all, about a million pounds of sugar were produced that first season.
One of the early visitors to the Lehi plant was LDS Church President Wilford Woodruff. At about age 90, feeble and wrapped in a shawl, he was seated where he could watch workers complete the process, pushing huge bags of sugar onto boxcars.
"This is one of the happiest experiences of my life," he said, with tears coursing down his cheeks, "to sit here and see that sugar flow into that car."
Despite the resounding first-year success of the Lehi plant, the company faced an uphill battle financially for several years. On one occasion, Cutler went to New York to raise money and came back to Utah with $50,000 in bills in a suitcase. Asked why he risked carrying so much cash such a distance, he answered that no bank in Utah at that time could have cashed a draft for that amount.
Company officials even found a use for the pulp waste left from the extraction process. They mixed it with cattle feed and tried to induce animals to eat it. However, the pulp, as one historian recorded, "smells to high heaven." Finally, one old cow so hungry she couldn't resist poked her nose into the mixture and found that despite what it did to the nose, it tasted wonderful on the tongue.
In an effort to streamline the operation, avoid muddy roads and other problems related to transporting sugar beets in the fall, the company built pipelines to bring beet syrup from the fields directly to the plant.
The beets were sliced and the juice extracted and then pumped, usually through more than 20 miles of pipe, to the refinery. The 24-mile pipe from Spanish Fork was the longest and the fourth put into service. Others came from Springville, West Jordan and Provo.
Eventually, alkali in the soil corroded the pipes, but by then, more efficient ways had developed to get beets to the factory.
By 1903, the Lehi plant was producing more than 333,000 bags of sugar each autumn and a second plant was opened in Garland, Box Elder County. Over time, the original company, later the Utah and Idaho Sugar Co., had 29 factories scattered throughout the West. Competing companies also thrived on sugar production.
Beet production provided work for thousands, including young people who did the backbreaking jobs of thinning and topping beets in the field. During sugar's heyday, thousands of them crawled along seemingly endless rows with short-handled hoes, thinning the leafy plants. Many schools excused students for several weeks each fall to work the fields. In the factory, most workers in the early 1900s earned $40 to $80 a month. Boilermen were paid $1.80 per hour for a 12-hour shift.
When Jordan High School opened in the second decade of the century, students proudly adopted the "Beetdigger" nickname as representative of a thriving industry.
The industry remained healthy for many years, but in the 1970s, due to competition, rising production costs and cessation of government price supports, output tumbled precipitously.
For many years, 25,000 to 30,000 acres of Utah sugar beets fed the refineries. In 1978, the U.S. Department of Agriculture statistical arm listed only 12,700 acres. The following year, 1,500 acres were reported and the last plant, in Garland, closed. In 1980, the last year estimates were made, there were 600 acres of Utah beets and they were sent to Idaho.
The industry had struggled into existence, filled a need and died in one of agriculture's natural cycles.