These Detroit Rotograte Stokers work great at continuously discharging ash from the burning of coal. These stokers at the Great Western’s Longmont refinery were part of a much larger system of boilers that fed steam power for the entire factory (photo copyright Jon Haeber).

Editor’s Note: This is the final section of the series, “Sugar Refineries in Colorado.” See part 1 here and part 2 here. It’s recommended that you read part 1 and part 2 before beginning with this section.

Sugar refineries in Colorado were powered by steam. The most popular steam boiler of choice for these factories were the Babcock and Wilcox water-tube boilers — revolutionary and efficient steam creators for their time. The power house of the factories featured a monumental array of ten massive boilers — all of which required incredibly coordinated logistical fueling using a continuous supply of coal. This was not done by manpower– everything was mechanized. Railroad cars delivered the coal, it was crushed into one-inch chunks, brought in by conveyence to mechanical stokers, burned, discarded through flumes, and finally exited as ash.

Men stand near the cossette slicing machine at Eaton, Colorado ca. 1910 (courtesy Denver Public Library).

This incredible steam power was utilized throughout the factories’ multiple rooms and corridors through a complex system of drive-shafts. workers could engage or disengage shafts through a series of levers and belt-transfer guides. Despite its incredible, 3,000 horsepower system of steam strength, these factories still employed 300-500 workers of various tasks — even their own chemistry and assay departments to measure the sugar content of incoming beets.

This box shaped contraption at the Longmont sugar refinery perplexed me, but I could only assume that it was pressurized, as indicated by the rivets and portholes (photo copyright Jon Haeber).

Corporate Consolidation of Sugar: A Massive Industry

Indeed, sugar in the eastern foothills of the Rockies was far from a small-town cottage industry. William May, who wrote The Great Western Sugarlands, claims that Colorado’s sugar industry produced more revenue than mining in the state. Combine the rich sugar content of Colorado’s beets with government-provided bounty for domestic producers of sugar — add the lynchpin of it all, the Dingley Act of 1897 (which levied a heavy tax on foreign sugar) — and you’ve got the perfect storm for a boom in beet production.

The factory at Eaton, CO. Notice the effluence coming from the smokestack. This is the lime kiln. The boiler house is outside of view from the image (photo courtesy Denver Public Library).

It was a perfect storm that was ripe for H.O. Havemeyer’s picking. Havemeyer did this as tactfully as any robber-baron could: through an extremely complicated system of acquisitions and alliances using his American Sugar Company Trust. As Eric Twitty in Silver Wedge so aply puts it, the trust “converted the Colorado sugar industry into a coordinated sugar-manufacturing machine, which it loosely balanced with its sugar sources elsewhere in the United States,” among which included half of Spreckels stake in sugar from Hawaii and California.

The Great Western Sugar Company fell victim to the growth of artificial sweeteners, foreign imports, and the dissolution of government subsidies. Only a few select sugar refineries in Colorado remain in operation (Photo copyright Jon Haeber).

Eventually, however, even corporate consolidation and efficiencies couldn’t mean the continued survival of an outdated commodity source. One by one, the factories across Colorado closed down. Corporate neglect may have partly been the reason, but it ultimately became simple geography. Once artificial sweeteners, sugarcane, and corn syrup took their stranglehold on the American sweetening industry sugar beets became a thing of the past. By 1985, all but one of Colorado’s grand sugar refineries had shuttered.

The workshop at Eaton Refinery. If you want esoterica, look no further than this workshop at Eaton’s sugar refinery. Here, were a number of whos-its and whats-its galore. One could only wonder what the worker in this workshop did in a typical day. No doubt there are plenty of opportunities for idle tinkering (Photo copyright Jon Haeber).

Further Reading on the Sugar Factories of Colorado

Silver Wedge: The Sugar Beet Industry in Fort Collins
http://www.ci.fort-collins.co.us/historicpreservation/pdf/sugar-beet-industry-doc.pdf

Historic Markers of Colorado — History of Sugar Beets in the State
http://www.coloradohistory.org/ripsigns/show_markertext.asp?id=825

Suspicious Monopolistic Agreement Between Great Western and H.O. Hevemeyer
http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9507EED9153CE633A25757C0A9609C946396D6CF

This is the historic Longmont Refinery today. Captured from the ground floor, this large format image shows exactly how many pipes, catwalks, and tanks occupy a typical refinery. Walking through a sugar refinery fills your mind with conjecture, shock, amazement, and curiosity — all at once (photo copyright Jon Haeber)

Editor’s Note: From the founding of the Greeley Colony after the Homestead Act, rough and determined Coloradans were in a desperate search for the perfect cash crop. By 1900, their savior had come in the form of sugar beets. Before they transformed this sweet crop into a cornucopia of cash, however, they needed investment. In Part I, we saw how Colorado was the perfect geographical location for sugar beets. Now we’ll see why factories required massive up-front capital investment. In part III (coming soon), you’ll see how steam power transformed the typical sugar refinery; you’ll find out how corporate consolidation led Colorado agriculture into its days of glory; and you’ll find out why only two remaining refineries out of dozens are still active in Colorado.

Inside these factories are massive machines — their own steel and brick monuments to a once-burgeoning industry. In order to understand the vastness of these factories, one must first understand the complicated process of sugar refining. For beets, this process multifarious and extremely energy-intensive. It required the importation of exorbitant amounts of coal and lime.

A map of the Longmont Sugar Refinery. Note the Steffens House (where MSG would later be made from beets), the incredibly large coal pits (this will be described more in Part III), and the extremely efficient train track layout.

Beet Washing and Flume Transport

First beets were both washed and transported through a series of flumes, but in order for them to be processed they needed to be brought to the top floor of the factory through a series of hoppers. Time was of the essence. As soon as the beets came in contact with water, they’d begin to diffuse their sugar.

Sugar beets needed to be carried to the top floor for the first step in processing. This required the use of an elaborate system of belts and flumes. Pictured above is an inclined conveyer that likely brought the beets up to a higher level. This conveyer is located at Eaton, Colorado (photo copyright Jon Haeber).

Cutting into Cossettes, Sublimation, and Lime Injection

Once on top, the beets went through a series of cutting machines, which sliced the beets into thin v-shaped pieces known as cossettes. The cossettes were fed into vast diffusion chambers, which were held under pressure, fed with boiling water, and allowed to steep for some time in order to sublimate the sugar from the cossettes. The spent cossettes were discarded, the steeped water was further brought into a soup of lime in order to purify the liquid-like sugar substance; then through a series of framed kelly filters; after which the filtered liquid was sent to a set of heat exchangers to keep it liquefied.

When one is in a sugar refinery, the sensory overload becomes overwhelming. These machines, like many in the refinery, perplexed me. However, I could reasonably deduce that — since they were on a lower story of the building, they were not the cutting (or cossette) cylinders. My educated guess says they are cylinders for griding lime rock. The pipe maze protruding from the cylinders probably sent the liquefied slurry of lime to be mixed with the sublimated sugar (photo copyright Jon Haeber).

Carbonation for Precipitation, Filtration, and Sulfur Station

Even after this process, the liquid, though containing no solids, remained a base due to the lime process. In order to solve this problem, the liquid was sent through carbonation tanks, where carbonic acid bubbled up through the juice, balancing the pH level and removing the lime. From there, it was sent to another set of filters, more heat exchangers, and on to the sulfur station.

These are the filter presses used to further purify the liquid sugar. In addition to filtering, the liquid had to go through both a lime and carbonation process before it became what is known as “standard liquor.”

It was at the sulfur station that the pH was further balanced and the sugar’s color was bleached white. Filtered one last time, it had finally became what the industry termed as “standard liquor,” containing a sugar content of 50-60%, but still in liquid form.

Workers stand in front of the famed lime kiln at the Eaton Refinery. Lime was an essential aspect of the refining process; it was useful in precipitating impurities in the beets.

Evaporation and Centrifuge Drying

In order to crystalize the liquid, the super-saturated liquid was sent through a series of evaporators, then to some centrifuges, and finally off to the market.

Drums of chemicals and grease are, not surprisingly, common in any sugar refinery. A typical refinery often leaves an indelible ecological footprint on the landscape (photo copyright Jon Haeber).

And that’s the simplified version! For the complete step-by-step process, visit this PDF document on Fort Collins sugar beet history.

Editor’s Addendum for Part II:As you see, a sugar factory was not only a multfarious process, it was also capital intensive. The Coloradans had a bounty, surely, but without the help of big money and intensive politicial lobbying, these factories would have never arisen from the Great Western Plains. In our third and final installment we’ll look at how the steam engine transformed the refineries in Colorado, along with corporate consolidation by Big Sugar headed by H.O. Havemeyer.

The Santa Ana Winds are clearly evinced using an inadvertent smoke dye in the sky. These hot, dry winds are the cause of some of California’s — and the world’s — most costly wildfires (courtesy NASA/BBC).

I am a child of Southern California. Though I feel more out of place there than anywhere else in the world, it is the place of my birth. As a child I remember the falling ashes and the smoke-engulfed sky. I remember the floods and the Rodney King riots, and the Northridge earthquake.

This past weekend, I was down in Ventura visiting family. It was a bright, clear day. We went into the theater to catch Across the Universe, the new movie inspired by the music of the Beatles. As we exited the corridors of the theater everything seemed darker and more orange in hue.

I walked outside and ashes were falling like snowflakes. Tiny bits of burnt mesquite and tumbleweed floated through the sky. It never snows in Ventura, so the experience was all the more surreal.

It was only after listening to the radio for a few minutes that I realized the gravity of the situation. I could guess how severe the problem would be. I knew the fires would burn and continue burning; the previous night the news had announced the arrival of the Santa Ana winds, whose zephyrs of hell blow Westward, defying all logic about the proverbial “ocean breeze.” Raymond Chandler in “Red Wind” describes the winds eloquently:

Those hot dry winds that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks. Anything can happen.

The Santa Ana’s hot, spine-tingling breeze comes from the East due to high pressure systems in the deserts. It’s a common misconception that these winds are heated by the desert, but the majority of the warmth is a result of adiabatic heating — the effect of air dumping from high altitudes into low altitudes; the subsequent compression of air causes it to warm up and expel any humidity.By the time these winds reach the California lowland coast, they’re bone-dry and they make you feel as if you’re walking on the face of Mars. They’re also the ideal winds for fires — and as they reached record levels above 75 mph last weekend, one could only guess what would follow.

A 2002 satellite image showing wind patterns. The red markers indicate Santa Ana patterns (courtesy NASA).

As of now, two have died, 1,200 homes and business are destroyed, a historic castle is in ruins, and 300,000 acres look like a mercurial firescape at this moment.

It is a uniquely geographic weather anomaly with devastating results. Why do people live in these places? Why are the most desirable home sites often the most disastrous? I only mean to pose the question. I have no answers.

Further Reading:

BBC News: California Santa Ana Fires
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7058809.stm

Wikipedia on Santa Ana Winds
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_ana_winds