BEET SUGAR IN THE UNITED STATES
While the manufacture of sugar from beet-roots is one of the foremost industries in the United States today, the early stages of its growth and development were marked by numerous failures and setbacks. The first beginning was made by a company headed by John Vaughn and James Ronaldson, which built a small factory in Philadelphia in 1830, where a few hundred pounds of sugar were produced. Owing to lack of knowledge of beet culture and extraction of sugar from the roots, the venture proved unsuccessful and no further attempt has been made in Pennsylvania.
Northampton, Massachusetts, was the scene of the next experiment in 1838 and 1839 by David Lee Child, who had studied the growth and manufacture of beet sugar in Europe for a year and a half. He succeeded in getting 6 per cent of sugar and 2½ per cent of molasses from the beets and his estimate of the cost of the sugar per pound was eleven cents. After producing 1300 pounds of sugar he abandoned the enterprise.
A report made in 1838 by the Committee on Agriculture, a government body, contains the following statement: “From all the information which the committee have been able to obtain, they are induced to believe that no country in the world is better adapted for the production of sugar beets than most parts of the United States, whether we consider the soil, the climate or the people.”[28]
In 1851 John Taylor, who afterward succeeded Brigham Young as president of the Mormon church, was carrying on missionary work in England, and in September of that year he met Elias Morris, whom he engaged to go to Utah to establish a plant for the manufacture of beet sugar.
Machinery for the purpose was purchased in France and sent to Liverpool, from where it was shipped to New Orleans in charge of Morris in March, 1852. From New Orleans it was taken up the Mississippi river to St. Louis, thence to Kanesville, Ohio, where it was loaded on wagons for transportation across the plains. The journey from the river was begun on July 4th, with oxen as the motive power. It proved long and arduous, but the members of the party reached Green river, Wyoming, four months later, having suffered much from hunger and cold. There they were met by a detachment sent out from Salt Lake city by Brigham Young and they finally arrived at their destination about the middle of November.
The original intention was to start operations at Provo, and the sugar machinery was taken there, but the company that John Taylor had organized was dissolved and the machinery turned over to the church, under whose direction it was installed in an adobe building still standing in Salt Lake city.
Once more lack of knowledge resulted in failure. Instead of sugar, the Mormons only succeeded in making a massecuite that was utterly inedible.[29]
In 1856, a coppersmith named Bepler erected a small beet-sugar factory at Ocean View, near San Francisco, California, but the enterprise was unsuccessful.[30]