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Show THE 6 CITIZEN I AN INSITE INTO THE CREATION OF THE UTAH-IDAHSUGAR COMPANY After tlie fall of the Roman Empire some of the barbarians in their O stt THMwss TDo Utahs senior Senator Reed Smootr who has been such a consistent worker in Congress for our domestic sugar industry. He is also the father of the General Superintendent of the Utah-Idah- o Sugar Company, B. R. Smoot, who has spent most of his life in the sugar business. However, the new plant was able only to produce syrup, so this enterprise temporarily waned. But the idea of home industry and the manufacture of sugar remained a predominant one and resulted in the building of a successful factory at Lelii, Utah, exodus into Bohemia, brought a few beet roots and in 1606, Oliver de Serres, the famous French agronomist became convinced by his scientific researches, that beets contained sugar, but he did not prosecute the development to a conclusion. Nearly a century later a young aspiring chemist in Germany worked out a practical method of manufacture and enlisted the support of Emperor Frederick William the III in building the first sugar beet factory in history at Cunern, Selesia. The daily capacity of about two tons of beets of this first sugar plant establishes a notable comparison to our industry of today in which plants operate with a capacity of more than 1,000 tons per day. The industry might have developed slowly from the experimental birth or lapsed again into oblivion, but for the stimulus of Napoleon Banaparte. He issued a decree that France must produce her own sugar and no longer be dependent upon Englands cane product brought in from the two Indies. A commercial war was raging between the two countries. Napoleon decided not to await the slow development of a new iudegenuous sugar industry, but to create it by Imperial demand. Thus in 1811 the French farmers, under compulsion, were tilling the soil, cultivating the sugar beet and factories were built. U. S. Starts in 1836 The first attempts at making beet suger in the United States were in Pennsylvania and Massach usetts about 1836, but with no substantial results. The American soil did not accept the sugar beet kindly. With the same tillage methods employed b ythe Eupropeans, the plant would not flourish and the idea was abandoned and we continued to depend upon Europe for our sugar supply. A few years after the Pioneers had settled in the Salt Lake Valley, Brigham Young, with the purpose of making his people independent and paramount in mind, saw in these vast fertile regions the feasibility of cultivating the sugar beet plant by irrigation. Water was abundant and the soil rich. (It is of historical note that this pioneer eclonv was the first in the world to develop the irrigation system of agriculture.) When the cultivation of the beet proved successful, the question arose: Why not divulge the process of manufacture and erect our own sugar factories and thereby strengthen the young empire in developing another source of independence? One of the members of Potential Sugar from Utahs Farms In drawing a comparable picture of what the sugar industry in Utah has accomplished in less than forty years, the first factory at Lehi, in its infancy, had the limited capacity of 300 tons of beets per day and only 10,500 sacks were produced during 150 Acres of Beets in Bear River Valley the first campaign, while today the plant at Jordan, Utah, located eighteen miles south of Salt Lake City, is capable of chopping 1,000 tons of beets in one day with a total production from the combined factories of 2, 000100 sacks of sugar in one season. self-sustaini- ng the colony, John Taylor, was dispatched to France to investigate the chemical process of manufacture and to purchase the necessary machinery. The fruits of this pilgrimage termi in 1891. The plant at Lehi still is considered the parent factory of the Utah-Idah- o Sugar Company, although the enterprise has broadened into a scope embracing Idaho, Washington, Montana, South Dakota and even Canada. The corporation with such pioneer industrial magnets at its helm as Heber J. Grant, president; W. H. Wattis, general manager; B. R. Smoot, general superintendent and S. H. Love, general sales manager, is now comprised of 16 active factories. Production Increases However, to accomplish such a stupendous production the factories must have their annual supply of sugar beets. The irrigation process of cultivating the beet is also a substantial theory externalized and now of the cultivated acreage in this 5 state is given over to growing this plant. Thus the dream of a staunch leau$? er of vision has more than come true. His people not only are in this one industry, but Utah now ranks third place in the sugar supply of the United States. self-sustaini- ng Boy Scouts at Brigham City Leave for the Fields nated in the development of one of the mountains was a toilsome one, it the largest industries existing today took nearly five months to reach the in the Salt Lake Valley, the Utali-I- d destination. The machinery was first alio Sugar Company. taken to Provo, Utah, but was later returned to Salt Lake City and inUtahs Sugar House stalled in the adobe building known The machinery was bought and from then on as the Sugar House. (This location is now a suburb and shipped from England to New Orleans and then up the Mississippi derived its name from this historical river by barges to Fort Leavenworth. factory. This building was erected From there it was hauled by a carabv Abraham O. Smoot and the first van of more than a operations were under his direction. ox teams to Salt Lake City. This It is an interesting coincident that made a heavy load and the trip over Mr. Smoot should be the father of half-hundr- ed 107 POUNDS OF SUGAR YEARLY ALOWANCE The annual consumption of sugar in this country totals over 12 billion pounds, with an estimated value $790,000,000 and a per capita consumption of nearly 107 pounds. New Zealand and Australia are the only countries which have a larger per capita consumption of sugar than the United States. |