How The Sugar Beet Built — And Later Left — Utah

PHOTO—Hired as a chemist for the Utah-Idaho Sugar Company in 1915, Ephraim Cluff worked at the Bellingham, Washington plant, and later Midvale, Utah. He married Emma Jane Dixon (Em Cluff) in Payson on August 28, 1909, six years before he started working for the sugar beet company. The newlyweds are pictured with a small wedding party that traveled, by horse and buggy, with them as they honeymooned at stops between central and southern Utah and back. This photo was taken near St George. (Photo courtesy of Coralee Wilson)

When a young farmer in the late 19th century sank a furrowed row of sugar beets into irrigated Utah soil, he was plugging into an industry that would reshape towns, shore up family farms and build smokestacks across the Intermountain West. For roughly a century the sugar-beet — a squat, white-fleshed root — was one of Utah’s most valuable cash crops. Its harvests filled railcars, paid wages in Main Street stores and underwrote canals, pipelines and new towns. But by the mid-20th century the economics of sugar, changing markets and consolidation hollowed out that industry. Today the beets are largely gone from Utah fields and the factories that once processed them stand either repurposed, recycled for parts, or only as memory and masonry on the landscape. 

From experimental patch to region-building industry

Utah’s sugar story begins with motive and water. Late 19th-century leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and territorial boosters wanted a local source of table sugar to reduce dependence on imports and to provide a dependable cash crop for dryland and irrigated farms. Investment in irrigation projects and beet-friendly acreage made the valley soils and seasonal climate attractive for the crop. By the 1890s organized companies — most notably what became the Utah-Idaho Sugar Company — were building central factories to process beets into raw sugar and finding eager farmers willing to plant beets under contract. 

Processing sugar beets is a capital-intensive, seasonal industry. Farms raised the beets through summer; in autumn crews harvested them, and the roots were hauled quickly to nearby factories for “slicing” — the first step that extracts the sweet juice. That juice was clarified, concentrated, and crystallized into raw sugar; molasses and pulp were off-products that became livestock feed or fertilizer. To move tons of watery beet pulp and fragile sliced beets, companies built short pipelines, cutting stations and rail spurs; the proximity of rail lines was often a deciding factor for factory locations. 

The Utah-Idaho Sugar Company — an empire with local faces

The Utah-Idaho Sugar Company (often shortened to U-I, later U & I) became the dominant industrial engine of this agricultural system. Consolidating earlier Utah and Idaho concerns in the early 20th century, U-I built, bought and moved plants to match acreage and water availability. The company’s ties to local institutions — including significant early investment by leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — gave it unusual influence in the region’s rural economy. At its peak the company controlled dozens of plants and thousands of contracted acres across Utah, Idaho and neighboring states, and paid millions of dollars a year to area farmers and wage laborers. 

The U-I story is also one of nimble logistics. Equipment was moved from closed plants to newer locations; where blight or low yields made a factory unviable, its machines were often lifted, freighted and re-installed elsewhere. That practice helped the company adapt to changing production patterns — but over time, consolidation and competition would shrink the footprint of factories in Utah. 

Payson and the Central Utah sugar boom

Payson, Utah — a farming community south of Provo — offers a succinct local example of how beet sugar shaped towns. A U-I plant opened in Payson in 1913, timed with irrigation improvements that expanded arable acreage in the region. In its early years the Payson factory processed thousands of acres of contracted beets; in 1915 local farmers planted more than 5,000 acres that produced nearly 37,000 tons of roots and yielded several thousand tons of sugar. Those receipts flowed into farmers’ pockets and the local economy: seasonal crews required lodging, merchants sold implements and groceries, and local banks and rail yards hummed during campaign months. For a generation the beet season produced extra employment, a predictable market for diversifying farms and a spike in land values near factory catchments. 

The ripple effects were social as well as economic. Seasonal beet crews — initially local and then increasingly migrant labor — bolstered small-town populations in fall months. The industry supported ancillary jobs: truck drivers, railroad hands, maintenance crews at canals and pipelines, and factory workers — from slicer operators to boiler men and chemists — whose steady pay stabilized families through harsh winters. Local merchants and professionals benefited from the added cash flow, and in many places the promise of beet contracts encouraged farmers to install deeper wells and irrigation works that improved other crops too.

People who worked the beets

The human labor of beet production is central to the story. Early decades relied on family labor and local seasonal help; during both world wars the industry also depended on alternative labor sources, including guest workers and, regrettably, coerced or interned labor in some regions. Over time mechanization — better tractors, mechanical harvesters and automated slicing — reduced the need for thousands of manual diggers, even as plant operations required more specialized technical staff. Utah’s beet workers included multi-generational farm families, new immigrants, and seasonal crews that followed the beet campaigns across the West. Many small towns remember generations who “worked the beet” as a rite of passage and a dependable source of income. 

Why the industry declined

A tangle of biological, economic and political forces produced the industry’s long retreat from Utah fields. Recurrent blights in the early 20th century — the curly-top virus and beet leafhopper infestations — forced plants to close or relocate. International trade and tariff shifts sometimes depressed sugar prices; the cost of shipping, processing and capital investment was high. By mid-century other sugar sources — notably cane sugar grown in tropical regions and refined more cheaply at scale — eroded the price advantage of western beet sugar. Antitrust scrutiny and industry consolidation narrowed the number of players and led to the shuttering or sale of smaller plants. Mechanization reduced seasonal labor demand, changing the social fabric around harvest time. By the 1940s and 1950s U-I and its regional competitors had already begun dismantling or mothballing many Utah plants. 

The factories today — chimneys, cell towers and memory

Walk the fringes of parts of Utah and you’ll still see echoes: a long brick wall, a tall chimney reclaimed as a cell-tower, a rusted rail spur now a walking trail. Many of the early factories — Lehi, Payson and Elsinore among them — were dismantled mid-century and the heavy machinery sent elsewhere. The Spanish Fork plant, which processed beets from nearby Payson for years, closed in 1952; its tall smokestack remains a visible landmark along the interstate, a vertical reminder of an industry that once hummed there. The Garland facility in northern Utah continued much longer (into the 1970s) but was ultimately closed and sold. Others were converted to storage, repurposed for light industry, or demolished; in many towns the sugar factory is now a historic plaque in the museum rather than a job center. 

Nationwide consolidation concentrated sugar refining into fewer, larger, and more modern plants — often outside Utah. Some equipment lives on in museums; brick and timber from dismantled plants were recycled into civic buildings in the early 20th century. And where sugar once guaranteed cash for a season, towns had to adapt — switching to dairying, fruit, alfalfa, commuter economies, or new manufacturing. The physical traces remain uneven: some buildings preserved as industrial archaeology, others vanished but for photographs in archives. 

What Payson and surrounding communities lost — and kept

For Payson and similar Utah communities the loss of the beet era was not merely the closure of a plant; it meant the loss of a predictable, annual economic pulse. Seasonal employment opportunities dwindled, local merchants lost fall and winter revenue spikes, and some farms that had specialized in beets either switched to different crops or left agriculture entirely. Yet the industry’s infrastructure investments — improved irrigation, canals, and roads — left lasting benefits. Many families who prospered during the beet years used the earnings to buy more land or invest in local business; civic institutions such as schools and banks that were strengthened by beet dollars continued long after the factories closed. In short, the economic imprint of the sugar beet era is both disappearance and durable legacy. 

Remembrance, interpretation and the museum story

Local historical societies, markers and newspaper retrospectives have preserved the sugar story: photographs of stacked sacks of sugar, portraits of beet crews, and newspaper accounts of the seasonal bustle. In recent years Utah historians and journalists have revisited the subject, documenting its significance to rural identity and calling attention to the factories’ physical remains — like the Spanish Fork smokestack — as heritage sites. A 2024 retrospective in local press underscores how, for nearly a century, “sugar beets were everywhere in Utah; now they’re nowhere to be found,” and explores the human memory of those seasons. 

Conclusion — a crop that shaped a region

The sugar-beet industry is a classic Western story: technological optimism and agricultural engineering turned arid valleys into cash-crop country; a single crop built factories, towns and lifeways; external markets, disease and structural change eventually diminished the industry’s footprint. Utah-Idaho Sugar—through its factories, contracts and investments—helped define the economic rhythm of Payson and dozens of other communities for decades. Today the beets themselves are a chapter in local history, but their effects — irrigation works, altered land use, and the social networks of farm and factory families — continue to ripple across the Utah landscape.

For towns like Payson, the sugar beet era remains a formative episode: a time when harvest season set the clock for the community and the turnover of a railcar of beets could make the difference between prosperity and struggle. The buildings may be gone and the fields repurposed, but in town museums, historic markers and the memory of old-timers, the sugar beet is still a crop that fed more than mouths — it fed towns. 

Sources & further reading: Leonard J. Arrington, Beet Sugar in the West: A History of the Utah-Idaho Sugar Company; Utah History Encyclopedia (article: “Sugar Industry”); BYU ScholarsArchive: A History of the Utah-Idaho Sugar Company, 1891–1966; UtahRails.net and Intermountain Histories (Spanish Fork and Lehi factory histories); Deseret News feature on the sugar-beet legacy (2024).