Sugar City's old factory gates mark a vanished boomtown

Before Crowley County became a textbook case in selling off farm water, it ran on something sweeter. Around 1900, a beet sugar factory rose on the plains here, and the town that grew up beside it took the obvious name: Sugar City.

For decades the rhythm of the place was the beet harvest. From October into the new year, crews pulled beets from the fields by hand while the factory ran around the clock, processing the crop until it was done. Sugar City was incorporated in 1900, the same year the plant came online, and the work shaped daily life for much of the county.

The factory stopped running in 1967 and was torn down in the mid-1970s. But its grand front entrance survived. The brick-and-wrought-iron gates, built around 1900 by George Feick & Company of Sandusky, Ohio, still stand at the southern edge of town. They are the only surviving piece of the plant that once dominated the landscape, and History Colorado recognizes them as a local landmark.

It is a quiet, photogenic stop: two old gateposts framing open ground where a boomtown’s biggest employer used to be. If you want the full, sourced story of the gates and the factory behind them, see History Colorado’s entry on the National Sugar Manufacturing Company Gates.