Drive the South Platte valley from Greeley to Julesburg and you pass the remains of an industry that once defined it: brick sugar factories in Fort Morgan, Brush and Sterling, beet dumps along the railroad sidings, and towns whose oldest families trace their roots to the Volga River or to northern Mexico.
Sugar from the plains
Irrigation made sugar beets possible here, and beets were a crop that paid. In the first years of the twentieth century factories rose across the valley, at Loveland in 1901, Greeley in 1902, Fort Collins and Windsor in 1903, Eaton in 1905 and Fort Morgan in 1906, with others at Brush, Sterling and Ovid. Most came together under the Great Western Sugar Company, backed by the Denver capitalist Charles Boettcher and the eastern Sugar Trust.
Beets needed hand labor on a scale the local population could not supply. Each spring the rows had to be blocked and thinned with short-handled hoes, the workers bent double; in the fall the beets were pulled and topped with knives. The company went looking for families.
The Volga Germans
It found them first among the Germans of Russia, descendants of farmers whom Catherine the Great had invited to settle the Volga steppes in the 1760s. When the czars stripped away their privileges in the 1870s, many emigrated to the American plains, and between about 1900 and 1920 thousands came to Colorado's beet country, sometimes whole villages at once. They had grown beets before, and they came as families, which the company valued because children could work. Before 1930 at least half of the beet laborers in the region were children. In 1915 the photographer Lewis Hine documented them for the National Child Labor Committee, and federal investigators studied children in the Larimer and Weld fields in 1916 and 1921.
Within a generation many Volga German families had saved enough to rent and then buy farms of their own, though during the First World War they found themselves suspected simply for being German.
The betabeleros
The company replaced them in the fields with Mexican and Mexican American workers, betabeleros, recruiting in southern Colorado, New Mexico and as far south as El Paso in the 1920s and 1930s. They lived in company colonias at the edges of towns and met much of the prejudice the Germans had met before them, and worse. In 1936, during the Depression, Governor Ed Johnson declared martial law along Colorado's southern border and sent the National Guard to turn back migrant workers, an order aimed squarely at Mexican and Hispano laborers; it was lifted after about ten days amid protests. From 1942 to 1964 the federal Bracero program brought contract workers from Mexico, and during the Second World War German and Italian prisoners of war were housed in company dormitories and sent into the rows.
What is left
Machines eventually did the thinning and harvesting, and one factory after another closed as the company declined; the Sterling plant became a warehouse. Great Western's remains passed to the grower-owned Western Sugar Cooperative, and Fort Morgan's factory is the last still making sugar in Colorado. The families stayed. In Fort Morgan, as in much of the valley, many trace their ancestry to the Volga Germans or to the Mexican and Mexican American workers who followed them into the fields. In Sterling, the tree sculptures stand in a town the beet money helped build.