Odd, Old News: Mammoth Beets And The Sugar Beet Industry That Never Took Root In Humboldt County

Postcard photo courtesy of the Humboldt Historical Society

“How we do things at Briceland, Cal.” [Postcard photo courtesy of the Humboldt Historical Society]

Nuggets of old news is served up once a week by David Heller, one of our local historians.

Odd Old News returns this April Fools’ week, not with a splash, but with a thud… the sound of a mammoth beet hitting the ground. This week we will talk about Beta Vulgaris, the common beet. With a long history as an offering to the gods, peasant survival food, cow sileage, dye source, and today, the star of many heart health commercials, the beet has also had a ‘near-history’ as a major crop in Humboldt County. Local bottomlands were viewed as ideal locations for potentially lucrative beet crops.

A previous post described oversized vegetables grown in the rich soil of the “Kittenpaum’ Valley:

—a turnip that measured three feet in circumference, five inches in depth, and of a weight of twenty pounds; a Belgian carrot two feet in length and sixteen inches in circumference; a beet two feet four inches in length and fourteen inches in circumference; potatoes over a pound in weight… .

Commenters were skeptical, suspecting that the boundaries of fiction and fact were being blurred on Odd Old News. Harrumph. Such skepticism may quickly be quieted:

The Petaluma Courier Says: “Up-country papers recently boasted of a beet which weighed 34 pounds. We have seen beets raised here, sound and solid, one of which weighed 75 pounds. One gentleman in a Vallejo township, who planted on adobe land two acres of Mangel Wurtzel beets, gathered sixty tons, some weighing as high as fifty pounds, and averaging throughout the crop from 15 to 30 pounds each. (Humboldt Times Standard, 12/05/1882).

Mammoth beets and vegetables were being grown. Around the state, pre-1900 newspapers recorded a 17 pound carrot with a 30 inch diameter, an 11 pound turnip, and 5½ pound potatoes. The “mammothest” beet award goes to a 90 pound beet that was displayed at the 1864 Napa Fair.

Obviously there are different categories of beets, the table beet, and what is called the stock, or cow beet that cattlemen grew as supplemental sileage for their animals. In the decades surrounding the turn of the 20th century the Humboldt county faire had contests for best ½ dozen table beets and best ½ dozen stock beets. As well as being more pleasing to the palate, small to medium sized beets were best for the sugar industry. For refining purposes, beets up to 2½ pounds were found have almost twice the sugar percentage of beets weighing 4½ to 7 pounds, and obviously, much more than the woodier mammoth beets fed to cattle. White beets were initially found to have a higher sugar content than the red beet. It takes about twelve pounds of beets make one pound of sugar, with white beets. At a time when the California beet sugar industry was booming, and one test showed Eel River Valley beets to have a 2% higher sugar content than average, there were regular appeals in the press for a sugar refinery to be built so farmers could take advantage of the new California money crop.

Beet

Beta Vulgaris

In the middle of the 19th century, the public’s increased demand for sugar had led to a rapid expansion of the beet sugar industry, dominated at that time by Germany. West coast “Sugar King” Claus Spreckel built his first large refinery in San Francisco. When his business outgrew its first two locations, he built a larger facility near Watsonville in 1888 at a cost of nearly $400,000. The success and growth of the Claus Spreckel Sugar Company operation got the notice of our local newspapers who saw the potential of a new crop that might be more profitable than wheat, or potatoes. The successful culture of beets required a deep, sandy loam which made the Eel River valley’s rich bottomlands a potentially fertile location.

The Ferndale Enterprise is talking sugar beets to the people of that section and recommending the building of a manufactory for the making of beet sugar. That journal says: From reliable statistics we learn that making sugar from beets is profitable, when sugar beets can be grown in ample quantities at reasonable figures, and wood also can be had at cheap rates. Now we have in this section thousands of acres of land, which, we are assured, will produce the sugar beet of good quality from fifteen to twenty tons per acre. The same soil, we know yields the best of food for animals, from fifty to one hundred tons per acre. If then the sugar beet can be grown here by the millions and sold at low figures, the farmers doing better thereby than now; and if wood can be had delivered at the door of the factory at about $1.50 per cord, is not this the place for a Sugar-Beet Factory? Why if money is made by such a factory at any point in California, it would seem that it could certainly be made here and hundreds of tons of beets consumed annually even at very low figures, what a source of revenue to our farmers and laborers. At the present low rates of potatoes, oats and barley the farmer is poorly paid. Growing beets at $5 per ton would be a God-send to Eel river valley. (Humboldt Times, 4/6/1879)

The Arcata bottoms were another prospective location:

In a recent issue I noticed a note from Mr. Dale of this county, stating that fifty tons of sugar beets could be raised here to the acre. In the same paper I saw that the owners of sugar factory in Alameda county had offered producers $4 per ton for sugar beets. Since then I have talked with several experienced farmers, and am convinced that if we can get a factory started sugar beets would be the best paying crop to raise here, even at $3 a ton. There are thousands of acres of the best bottom lands here that, as Mr. Dale avers, would average fifty tons of beets to the acre, and it is alone, to say nothing of the Arcata bottoms, could produce 100,000 tons if there was any market for them. This land is entirely without alkali, and finely adapted to the growing of carrots, turnips, beets, etc. Since potatoes have failed to be a paying crop Humboldt farmers are obliged to fall back on something else, which this year is wheat, but after all expenses are paid by growers so far from market they find very little margin left for profit from its raising. (Humboldt Times, 3/13/1880).

Around the state, farmers were planting more beets, and nine years later, the crop’s economic potential in Humboldt county was still apparent.

There have been more fortunes made in sugar-making during the past 80 years than by any other vegetable product, and the demand is increasing all over the world at a large percentage yearly. We think that the farmers of this county should make experiments in the production of sugar beets with a view of testing the adaptability of their soils, and shaping matters so that the new industry may take root and flourish in Humboldt county. (Humboldt Times Standards, 2/03/1888)

Spreckel counseled that

\The first cost of beet sugar factories is so great that no one should commence the erection of one until it has been demonstrated by practical tests that the beets grown on the land where it is proposed to establish a factory contain the requisite per cent of saccharine juice. Large beets can be grown almost anywhere; but large beets are not wanted for sugar making. (Pacific Rural Press. 1/7/1888).

Spreckels claimed that it was not hard to make a minimum of $60 an acre with beets, and recommended the German practice of crop rotation with wheat which had boosted their wheat yields as well.

News of sugar beets being raised in less optimal locations like Colorado and Southern California raised the cry:

Why should not Eel River valley have a beet sugar factory? There is probably no part of the State that can produce vegetables and especially root-crops in greater abundance. The bottom lands are now very valuable for dairying purposes, but for raising beets in conjunction with butter-making they would be still more valuable. This industry would furnish employment to a large number of men, both at the factory and on the farms. A factory located at Ferndale or Swauger’s we believe would result in great benefits to the Eel river section. Some preliminary work could be accomplished at very little cost to demonstrate the capabilities of the section and the profits of the enterprise. But the first step necessary is for the farmers to organize so that the expense to any one may not be felt. Then procure seed and let the trial be made. When the beets are tested it will be easily determined whether the plan of a factory is feasible or not. Should an industry of this character materialize in Eel River valley but a few years will elapse before all our marsh land would be reclaimed. The suggestion of a beet sugar factory is at least worthy of a serious consideration on the part of our farmers. (Humboldt Times, 2/14/1889).

At this time there were only two beet sugar refineries in North America, one in Canada and the one near Watsonville. One Southern Humboldt rancher, lured by the promise of riches, dreamt of a refinery on Elk Ridge:

The Enterprise is reliably informed that L. T. Kinsey, of the Bank of Eureka is still on his ranch on Elk Ridge, where he is putting in a big crop of sugar beets. It is also stated that Lew intends erecting a sugar beet factory there if everything comes just right, and hopes yet to die a Claus Spreckles. (Humboldt Times, 5/11/1898).

By 1909, Americans were eating 80 pounds of sugar per annum, for a national yearly consumption of some 6,400,000,000 pounds. A European ‘sugar trust’, propped up by tariff laws, and viewed by some as making Standard Oil’s monopoly look benevolent, was costing the American consumer an estimated $150 million per year. In this era, little sugar consumed in America was refined from beets, sugarcane was the source of 94% of sugar consumed. Throughout the state, many acres were planted with sugar beets in the 1900’s, and by 1965, California was the largest sugar beet producing state in the country.

The last flicker of hope for a North Coast beet industry was in Del Norte County:

CRESCENT CITY, May 22.—G. E. Rensel, representing the Spreckles interests in San Francisco, has been in this section for a week. He is much interested in Smith River Valley as the location for a beet sugar factory. Bensel visited the farmers of that section, explaining plans in detail. A number of them have agreed to try a crop of beets this season, the seed to be furnished by the company. It appears that the sugar beet requires to be irrigated when grown in the southern part of the State. Bensel has studied the rainfall records of this county for the last 10 years, and is convinced that climatic conditions here would be ideal for beet production”(Blue Lake Advocate, 5/27/1922).

As bright as its prospects seemed, the industry never took root in Humboldt County, though large vegetables continued to be grown in the county:

Harpst & Spring have on exhibition at their store two specimens of Mangle Wertzel beets of the Yellow Giant Intermediate variety. They weigh respectfully 19 1-2 and 21 1-2 pounds each. There are also two carrots of the Half-Long Orange variety weighing 4 1-2 and 5 1-2 pounds. They were raised by Joseph Debault of Bayside. (Humboldt Time Standard, 1/28/1900).

Odd Old News supports the idea of bringing mammoth beet contests back to the county faire, and encourages readers to add more nutritious and heart friendly beets to your diet.

Bonus history factoid (courtesy of Wikipedia)

The first attempts at sugar beet cultivation were pursued by abolitionists in New England. The “Beet Sugar Society of Philadelphia” was founded in 1836 and promoted home-produced beet sugar as an alternative to the slave-produced cane sugar from the West Indies or sugar imported from Asia (called “free sugar” because it was grown without using slavery), but tasted “awful.””

Earlier Odd and Old News:

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11 Comments
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Mr. Bear
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Mr. Bear
2 years ago

“As bright as its prospects seemed, the industry never took root in Humboldt County”

I see what you did there

Guest
Guest
Guest
2 years ago
Reply to  Kym Kemp

As far as puns go that I’ve ever heard, that ones got to be the borscht.

Vic Jooles
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Vic Jooles
2 years ago

Let’s get SunValley to plant 22 acres of beets rather than pot in the Arcata bottoms. Beet sugar is probably much healthier and with all the interest in beet powders, etc a new Humboldt product would be welcomed. Weed is everywhere and ya can’t eat it! Really only good for the couch or Cancer patients. I don’t think this idea can be beet..

Ernie Branscomb
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Ernie Branscomb
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2 years ago

My mother and Grandmother would not make confections with anything but Cane Sugar. They would make syrups, jellies, and hard candies in the fall of the year for Christmas presents and treats. My grandmother was a super vanilla taffy puller. She would flip that stuff around like a machine. When I would try it they would put butter on my fingers to keep it from sticking to my hands. I would pull and fold and pull forever and would I just end up with a sticky mess. I thought that it was better than anyone else’s taffy and I would eat it all myself.

According to the “Old Wives” in my family, beet sugar was only good for coffee or lemonaide.

David Heller
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David Heller
2 years ago

Good to know what the “Old Wives” believed Ernie. I wonder if beet sugar was different back then, any less refined. I have bought a bag or two of beet powder in the last year and it is quite sweet on its own when mixed in water, I call it my heartwater… fresh beets are always best of course. Really a remarkable tuber. Like many, my path to a greater appreciation of beta vulgaris was through Tom Robbins fun novel Jitterbug Perfume.

Fireradio
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Fireradio
2 years ago

I was raised in the Salinas Valley where my uncle worked for Spreckles Sugar, and we raised sugar beets for that factory on our place…and the renter who ran cattle on the beet tops left in the field had to monitor his cows to make sure they didn’t choke or explode in one of their 4 stomachs if something got stuck in the elimination process of cattle. He had to stick them with a tool that let the air escape, or they’d die. I boycotted cane sugar for years…but Spreckles abandoned the valley, after my uncle retired. Now the valley is home to probably more weed farms than Humboldt is…sigh!

David Heller
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David Heller
2 years ago
Reply to  Fireradio

Interesting Fireradio, do you think those cows were eating stray beets to cause the bloating? Or just the greens? I have read that they had to cut the whole beets into smaller pieces for the cows back when?

TD
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TD
2 years ago
Reply to  Fireradio

Corn Lund brings up sugar beet chokes in cattle in a song.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JChwFoCxVC8

No Joke
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No Joke
2 years ago

Anybody else remember that dubious “Y2K apocalypse” beet farm they were trying to get “investors” for in Blue Lake?