Sugar City, Colorado

Sugar City is located in the eastern plains of Colorado, north of the Arkansas River. Lake Meredith is just south and southwest of town.

From 1900 to 1967, the National Sugar Company had their main sugar beet processing plant in Sugar City. The company imported Germans from Russia in 1900 to build the factory. For many years, the primary focus for many people throughout Crowley County was the harvesting and processing of the sugar beet crop between October and January. After long summers of labor-intensive cultivation, October would find thousands of workers in the fields pulling beets by hand, while hundreds more folks worked round-the-clock at the factory, processing beets until the entire crop was done. Over the years, the company recruited many Hispanic workers and, during World War II, German POW's and Japanese-American detainees did some of the work.

Annually, National Sugar converted thousands of acres of sugar beets into millions of pounds of granulated sugar. The company was a successful independent in an industry dominated by multi-national conglomerates. National Sugar stayed profitable through price fluctuations, poor beet harvests, labor shortages, and other crises, providing work to scores of laborers and a dependable income to many local farmers. And then, despite a run of record breaking harvests, the artificially collapsing commodity markets (with a bit of federal government assistance) in 1967 pushed National Sugar into bankruptcy and killed the business. Sugar City, though, is still here...