First Sugar Manufactured in Michigan

The vial depicted above contains the first sugar produced in Michigan. It is stored among the collections of the Michigan Historical Museum in Lansing, Michigan. The sugar was produced on October 5, 1898.

Beet sugar was first made in Michigan at Michigan Sugar Company located in Essexville, Michigan, a suburb of Bay City. The company president was Thomas Cranage who had achieved success in two other Michigan industries, shipping and lumber.

The first sugarbeet processing season ("campaign" in the parlance of the industry) in Michigan's history was, by every account, a remarkable success. Farmers harvested an average of 10.3 tons of beets from each of 3,103 acres for a total of 32,047 tons of sugarbeets. The sugar content of the beets averaged 12.93 percent with a purity of eighty-two percent from which the factory extracted 5,685,552 pounds of sugar. A sugar content of 12.93 percent meant each purchased ton of beets contained 258.6 pounds of sugar. From that, the new sugar factory packaged 169 pounds, which equated to total sugar recovery of sixty-nine percent. Just the same, within a short time, the owners realized the factory’s smallness made it unsuitable for efficient operation. It operated until 1906 then lay idle until it was dismantled and moved to Waverly, Iowa in 1907 where it continued to produce sugar until 1942. . Michigan Sugar Company paid an average of $4.51 per ton of beets, an amount that immediately classified sugarbeets as a premier cash crop

By way of comparison, the remaining factory in Bay City today routinely processes more than 1.2 million tons of beets during a campaign. The sugar content will usually achieve eighteen percent or better from which the factory will extract approximately ninety percent, which translates into more than 345 million pounds of sugar, about seventy times more than was produced during the state’s first sugarbeet campaign.

The sugar sample rests in a vial three inches in length. For many years it was in the possession of Donald North, the chief chemist of the German-American Sugar Company, later known first as Columbia Sugar Company, then Monitor Sugar Company and eventually, a component of Michigan Sugar Company How it came into his possession is unknown. However, the Michigan Sugar Company's factory was situated only a few miles from the German-American Sugar Company. It was common for employees to transfer employment from one sugar factory to the next. It is possible that Mr. North was employed at Michigan Sugar Company at the time the sugar was made. Another possibility arises from the fact that he was a good friend of Luther Carpenter, a former chief chemist for Michigan Sugar Company. He may have transferred the vial to Donald North when he left Michigan to take a position with the American Sugar Crystal Company in 1918. In any event, the sample was considered important to him - important enough that at an early date he passed the vial on to Clayton Wanless, a fellow chemist. Toward the end of Wanless's life which occurred on October 7, 1951, he passed it on to his son, Charles ("Bud") Wanless.

Charles Wanless retained the vial for the next twenty-five years. He began to worry about its safekeeping because of advancing age. He learned of Thomas Mahar, the newly appointed financial controller of Monitor Sugar Company - learned that he was collecting records and other artifacts pertaining to the company's history. He met with Mr. Mahar and during an emotional moment explained the importance of the vial, explained that it represented the history of pioneers and that the history was slipping away. Mahar accepted the vial and promised that the names of the previous conservators would not be forgotten. He retained the vial for the next twenty-three years. Upon his retirement in 1999, he handed the vial to Robert Arnold, the factory superintendent and asked him to accept responsibility for its safekeeping.

Robert Arnold kept the vial for six years, returning it to Mahar in 2005. Mahar had been in commuication with the Michigan Historical Society in Lansing, Michigan. That organization agreed in May, 2005 to accept it as an historical artifact. It resides there now.

The Owosso Sugar Company - A History

By Thomas Mahar

No sooner had Saginaw's lumber tycoon, Wellington R. Burt, celebrated his 70th birthday on August 26, 1901 than did he set out to employ a portion of his lumber wealth in the awakening beet sugar industry.

The mantra of real estate agents everywhere is "location, location, location." However, in the business world in general it should be, "timing, timing, timing." Wellington Burt's timing so far as his interest in sugar was concerned, was poor.

Like others who had filled their days in the once fast-paced but now moribund lumber industry, he had time on his hands and money in the bank. At first, also as had others, he devoted some years to politics. He had served a term in the state senate (1893-1894) then sought a U.S. Congressional seat but had the ill fortune to run as a Democrat in 1900, the year the Republican star was rising. Ranked as one of America's wealthiest men, Burt cast about for new investment ideas and then homed in on the sugar industry. His set his eyes on Owosso, Michigan, a village situated some thirty miles southwest of Saginaw where several holdovers from the lumber industry resided in mansions arrayed along Washington Avenue. Among Owosso's many attributes was the influence of Joseph Kohn, a sugarbeet technologist residing in Bay City, Michigan. Kohn presided over the Michigan Chemical Company which had been put in place to purchase and then process molasses generated by that city's growing number of sugar beet factories. His success at Michigan Chemical encouraged investors to draw close when he spoke of investing in beet sugar factories.

For Kohn it was simple, the more sugar beet factories the more molasses for Michigan Chemical, which could be distilled into alcohol, a circumstance that built enthusiasm for the construction of another factory. Fat with profits, Michigan Chemical and its parent, Pittsburgh Plate Glass, sought to build a factory in Owosso on its own and didn't need the interference of another millionaire with time on his hands and money in his pocket. Wellington R. Burt was not invited to join in a venture with Michigan Chemical and his ambitions to go on his own languished behind a curtain of international events

The United States had agreed upon the conclusion of the Spanish-American War to reduce the import duty on Philippine sugar 75 percent of the general rate and to allow the importation of sugar from Puerto Rico, a U.S. possession, entirely free of duty. The Philippines had the additional advantage of shipping up to 300,000 tons duty free and Congress was dithering with proposed legislation that if passed, would approve a treaty of reciprocity with Cuba. The agreement would grant that country a 20 percent tariff preferential.

The nation’s newspapers devoted considerable space to the plan, dampening the spirits of those who had at first shown much excitement about Burt’s proposed factory. He could find few others to join him in a venture in Owosso, although he pledged $200,000 of his personal fortune and claimed others had subscribed another $50,000 in stock. He had convinced farmers to sign up to grow sugarbeets on three thousand acres and contracted with the experienced firm of Fuehrman and Hapke to begin construction when it fell apart because investors had not come forth with the balance of the required investment – about $600,000.

Michigan Chemical Company waited in the wings while additional investors failed to materialize. Elsewhere, excitement for beet sugar factories hardly slowed. Sixteen were built in the United States between 1900 and 1902, eight in Michigan. Burt's attention turned to Alma, Michigan where he met more success by combining his money and talents with those of Aimee Wright, another Saginaw industrialist.

Owosso, in 1902, was as good a candidate for a beet factory as any town in Michigan, perhaps better. It had rail lines, established industry, a managerial class and trained workers in addition to an excellent farming region. Burt stepped aside, allowing the project to die stillborn. Fuehrman and Hapke went on to construct the Sebewaing factory in the next year, creating one of the most successful beet factories of the era. Michigan Chemical emerged from the shadows and picked up the reins.

Owosso was home to two families with notable achievements in American politics. Both would play various roles in the establishment of a beet sugar factory in Owosso. The Bentley family, headed by Alvin Bentley, whose grandson, also named Alvin, achieved fame at great personal expense in 1954 when as a junior Congressman, he became the most seriously injured of five victims of an armed assault on Congress while it was in session. Four Puerto Rican terrorists discharged thirty rounds from the visitor’s gallery of the U.S. House of Representatives to the floor of that chamber while the Representatives were debating an immigration bill.

The Dewey family had been engaged in Republican politics since the party’s formation in nearby Jackson, Michigan in 1854. In Owosso, in accordance with tradition, a leading representative of the political party then in power held the postmaster’s position. Edmund O. Dewey, uncle to Thomas Edmund Dewey, a future New York governor and twice an unsuccessful candidate for the U.S. presidency, held that position beginning with the presidency of William McKinley and ending with the presidency of Woodrow Wilson. His brother George, the father of Thomas Edmund Dewey, secured the appointment in 1921.

Edmund Dewey, in 1902, revived Wellington Burt’s plan for a beet sugar factory in Owosso. He arranged the purchase of a suitable 40-acre site at the west end of Oliver Street, raised $10,000 and urged the county board of commissioners to pass a bond issue sufficient to meet the cost of the land. The county denied the bond, causing the idea to fail for a second time and for the same reason – a lack of enthusiasm.

Joseph Kohn stepped forward and in doing so introduced into Michigan's fired up sugar industry one the nation's wealthiest families, the Pitcairn family of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The Pitcairn family controlled the Pittsburg Plate Glass Company (today known as PPG Industries) headquartered in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania. The glass company had all but ended America’s dependence on Europe for large sheets of glass suitable for storefronts, display cases and mirrors. During the opening days of the 20th century, the company produced 20-million square feet of glass annually.

In seeking a source of potash for its glassworks, Pittsburgh Plate Glass turned to Kohn who made an effort to extract it from beet sugar molasses and instead found he could earn assured profits by converting molasses into alcohol. He had also served the German-American Sugar Company (later named Monitor Sugar Company) as a consultant and before that held a similar position with Kilby Manufacturing who was much involved in turnkey beet sugar factory construction projects. Kohn’s Bay City distillery, owing to the large volume of molasses emerging from three sugar factories and more promised from the German-American Sugar Company’s factory then under construction, was turning over substantial profits to Pittsburgh Plate Glass.

John Pitcairn saw America’s shores first as five-year old immigrant brought to America by his parents John and Agnes along with two sisters and a brother. Pitcairn accumulated a personal fortune in railroads, coalmines, oil, and in the founding of the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company in partnership with John Ford. He was sixty-years old when Kohn drew his attention to the potential in Owosso and the failed effort of first Wellington Burt, then Edmund Dewey to form a beet sugar company.

Three’s the charm for Owosso. On October 29, 1902, the Owosso Sugar Company came into existence, capitalized at one million dollars. More than 75 percent of the shares were owned by members of the Pitcairn family and friends. John Pitcairn owned 62,500 of the outstanding shares outright. A handful of Owosso residents added their names to the shareholder list, including the aforementioned Alvin Bentley and the brothers Edmund and George Dewey. George Dewey’s son, Tom, the future presidential candidate, would one day spend school vacations working in the new sugar company’s packaging room.

The company presidency was turned over to Charles W. Brown, the owner of newly minted 5,600 shares of stock. Brown was also the president of Pittsburgh Plate Glass. Day to day financial duties went to 36-year old Edward Pitcairn, one of John Pitcairn’s many nephews. Edward would, by 1910, become treasurer of Pittsburgh Plate Glass, a position he would hold for the balance of his career. Carmen Smith, an attorney with a long association with Charles Brown, stemming from a period when the pair resided in Minneapolis, assumed responsibility for the general management of the new firm. In addition, he assumed the title of Secretary-Treasurer. He had recently moved his wife Isabella and three children, Margaret, Carmen, and Cedric to Bay City where he served as the treasurer of Michigan Chemical Company. Joseph Kohn accepted the role of general factory superintendent.

Educated at the Prague Institute of Technology, Kohn graduated in 1883 with degrees in mechanical and chemical engineering. Following his schooling, he was employed at Breitfeld-Danek of Prague and later gained experience at a sugar factory in Moravia, a region in what is now the Czech Republic but was then a part of the Austrian-Hungary empire, and also worked with the evaporator designer, Hugo Jelenik. In Moravia, he worked with Carl Steffen, the inventor of the molasses desugarization process that carries his name. While employed by Kilby Manufacturing Company, Kohn developed the Kilby standard factory arrangement.

Kilby Manufacturing won contracts to construct two 1,000-ton factories in Michigan; one at Owosso and another at Menominee. The two would hold the record as the largest beet factories built in Michigan until a 1,200-ton factory was built at Mount Pleasant in 1920. In addition to the two 1,000-ton factories, Kilby had an order for a standard 600-ton factory for East Tawas. It would be a busy year for Kilby who had also received orders for three factories in Colorado, one each for Fort Collins, Longmont, and Windsor with Fort Collins gaining the largest factory built by Kilby-1,200 tons a day slicing capacity. The price for the Owosso factory, at $675,000, on a per ton of sugarbeets sliced basis, was low at $675 compared $1,197 at East Tawas and $785 at Menominee. In fact, the Owosso factory cost less per ton of slice than any factory built in Michigan.

The Owosso factory came to life on December 9, 1903 without the usual fanfare assigned to new beet sugar factories which usually included marching bands, parades, and much merriment followed by speaking opportunities for local luminaries and politicians. In a quieter fashion, Charles W. Brown, arrived from Pittsburgh and brought with him as an honored guest, James Wilson, the Secretary of Agriculture. He rose to national prominence when President William McKinley appointed him Secretary of Agriculture in 1897. His stature was such that presidents Roosevelt and Taft retained him as secretary, and it was only when in 1912 in a move to sweep Republican appointees from office, Woodrow Wilson ended his tenure. He had served as Secretary of Agriculture from March 4, 1897 to March 3, 1913, the longest duration served by any American cabinet official.

After a brief ceremony, Secretary Wilson pulled the whistle cord that called forth the beets from the flumes. Unlike many of the beet factories built in Michigan, there was no central local figure that had put his money and reputation on the line for the factory. The majority ownership was far away in Pennsylvania, its officers and guiding management lived elsewhere, Bay City in the case of Joseph Kohn and Carmen Smith and the environs of Pittsburgh for Brown and Pitcairn. It was not unusual for absentee owners to overlook the obvious – input from farmers. When a lack of farmer interest made itself known, it caused no palpitations in the boardroom of Pittsburgh Plate Glass. After all, twenty years earlier John Pitcairn had forged a new American industry out of the rubble of similar but failed efforts when he wrestled the plate glass market away from the Europeans and developed one of the world’s largest and most modern factories of its kind.

Farmer apathy was a mild inconvenience, not a crushing blow to someone who had turned the making of plate glass into a unique American industry. The answer lay near at hand and Carmen Smith, his appointed emissary, had probed the possibilities even as the factory walls reached toward the sky to the amazement of Owossians who had gathered on weekends throughout the summer of 1903 to take in the breadth and dimensions of the industrial goliath growing in their midst. Clearly, the Pittsburgh Plate Glass people thought big. They thought even bigger than the factory’s sidewalk superintendents imagined, bigger than had any beet factory organizer up until that time. Not only were they building a beet factory destined to be twice the size of nearly all the sugar factories in the United States, they were at the same time on the verge of establishing the largest sugarbeet farm in the United States and the largest single farm operation east of the Mississippi River.

South and west of Saginaw, Michigan lay a vast marsh formed during the last ice age. The marsh adjoined the convergence of several large river systems that became the Saginaw River that then and now flows 22 miles northward to Lake Huron. The eighteen thousand acre marsh served as an important stopover point and brooding ground for migrating waterfowl, ducks, geese, swans. It was the largest natural wildlife habitat in the American Midwest. It was protected by characteristics that made it unappealing to farmers – frequent flooding. But that changed when Harlan B. Smith, a Saginaw buggy manufacturer who also speculated in real estate, entered into a partnership with two attorneys Charles H. Camp and George B. Brooks, to acquire and then develop approximately 10,000 acres of the marsh. Their efforts, spanning fifteen years, resulted in a large drainage ditch that extended nearly two miles across the prairie, permitting them to convert hundreds of acres of marsh into farmland.

When Carmen Smith searched for a large tract in which to install a demonstration sugarbeet farm while at the same time assuring the Owosso factory would have all the beets it would want, he quickly targeted the Prairie Farm. Smith completed the purchase on February 22, 1903 and soon, a steam-powered dredge, a monster designed for digging into mucky earth, was soon barged down the Saginaw River to the prairie. It bit into the earth in the front, forming a 20-foot high dike and creating a canal, which it used to transport itself until acre-by acre, it claimed land that had waited a half a million years for the arrival of the mechanical behemoth.

Eventually, Owosso Sugar Company created thirty-six miles of dikes, some of them eighty feet wide at the bottom, forty at the top and twenty feet high. Others were of lesser dimensions but all designed for the same purpose – draining and then keeping the land dry. Roads crowned the tops of the dikes and the sides turned to grass for use as a sheep pasture. Half the land was drained via open ditches and half was drained with the aid of large pumps that sent their burden to the nearby Flint River. Once it was dry, the reclaimed land was laid out much like a giant checkerboard in twelve lines of sixteen forty-acre parcels. Almost overnight, for a capital outlay of $400,000, Smith transformed the Prairie Farm from a losing proposition into the largest beet sugar estate in Michigan, and probably in the United States, if not the world – ten thousand acres. The new factory could now set aside worry about an adequate supply of beets.

Owosso Sugar Company’s First Campaign

The first operating campaign for the Owosso Sugar Company, as was customary with Kilby designed turnkey factories, achieved the guaranteed slice rate of 1,000 tons of sliced beets each twenty-four hours. Construction contracts typically required that a new factory meet its guaranteed rate for a specified period of time, set by negotiation, at between one and ten days and usually occurred under the supervision of Kilby’s engineers some days after the startup. The same engineers would withdraw once the new owner signed the certificate of completion, handing the factory over to the company’s management staff. The slice rate at Owosso declined after the factory reached the guaranteed rate most likely for the same reasons slice rates in most new beet factories declined – inexperienced operators.

Because the Prairie Farm was yet in its infancy, it produced fewer beets than it would in the following years causing the processing period, referred to as a "campaign" by the industry, to last only 48 days, ending on January 26, 1904. During its maiden run the new factory sliced an average of 542 tons, well short of the scheduled 1,000 tons per day. The second campaign was five days shorter but the slice rate nearly doubled, reaching 930 tons per day for 43 days.

While the Owosso factory was under construction, the Lansing beet factory, built by Benjamin Boutell, a major investor in several Michigan beet sugar factories, and others two years earlier, suffered from a lack of managerial oversight. Diagnosed with cancer early in 1902, Boutell’s wife, Amelia died on November 27 at the age of 52 despite his best efforts to discover a cure. Having no heart for his business interests, he sold the Lansing factory to the Owosso Sugar Company.

Kohn and Smith now had four major operations: two sugar factories, the Prairie Farm, and Bay City’s Michigan Chemical Company under their control whereas one year earlier they had only the chemical company to occupy their time and thoughts. The Prairie Farm employed 160 workers and 58 teams of draft horses and each of the two beet factories employed hundreds more in addition to workers at the chemical factory and in the Bay City headquarters. The two managers, each 45 years old, were in constant motion, visiting the properties, the corporate office in Pittsburgh, and attending industry conventions in addition to meeting with members of Congress and the Department of Agriculture. In 1910, Joseph Kohn was the first to reckon the cost of such a pace. He suffered a heart attack and died at the age of 52.

In the year preceding Kohn's death, 8,500 Prairie Farm acres had been diked and equipped with gravity drainage and pumping systems and for the first time, grew a square mile of sugarbeets. Peppermint provided additional revenue (35,000 pounds of peppermint oil in 1909) while cabbage followed in importance behind sugarbeets.

For the six years following Kohn’s death, Carmen Smith continued on as before, shouldering Kohn’s responsibilities in addition to his own, until 1916 when he placed the two sugar factories under the supervision of Charles D. Bell who had served as the factory manager at Alma before joining the Owosso staff in 1907. Bell remained at Owosso for sixteen years, leaving only after Michigan Sugar Company acquired the Owosso and Lansing factories in 1924 whereupon he returned to the family ranch in Los Alamos, California where he promptly discovered oil and retired in wealth.

In 1920, at age 62, Carmen Smith, much like his friend and associate, Joseph Kohn, succumbed suddenly to a heart attack while traveling home by train from Chicago. With Carmen Smith passed a pioneering era. Joseph Kohn in 1910, Joseph Kilby in 1914, John Pitcairn in 1916, and Carmen Smith in 1920 - those who had lived the dream of building one of the world’s largest and most modern beet sugar factories and then topping it with the country’s single largest beet farm, had passed from the scene. Sadly, what they had wrought would not last.

According to Daniel Gutleben’s history of the Michigan beet sugar industry (The Sugar Tramp -1954), Pittsburgh Plate Glass, likely concerned that Michigan’s beet factories, built too small to compete with major refineries designed to process raw sugar imported in quantity, couldn’t compete against the volume of duty-free sugar entering the country. It opted to sell both the Owosso and Lansing factories to Michigan Sugar Company at a price reported in the press at $2,000,000 plus preferred stock. The Prairie Farm remained in the hands of John Pitcairn’s heirs.

Michigan Sugar Company operated Owosso for the next four years until diminishing interest on the part of farmers combined with the flood of imported sugar caused the factory to close in 1928. Michigan Sugar lacked the chief advantage once held by the former owners - the Prairie Farm thus could not command farmers to grow beets when other crops, corn and soybeans attracted favorable prices for less investment and less work. It re-opened again for one year in 1933, then shut down but was kept in hopeful readiness. Hope finally surrendered to reality that the farmers would not return. The factory and buildings were sold in 1948. Proof that the eventual failure of the Owosso Sugar Company did not rest upon the shoulders of management lay in the appointment of Owosso's secretary, Edward Bostock, to the chairmanship of the board of directors of Michigan Sugar Company.

Sources:

DENSLOW, William R, and TRUMAN, Harry S., 10,000 Famous Freemasons from A to J Part One (in reference to Charles W. Brown career with Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company)

MILLER, Ed, and BEACH, Jean R.., The Saginaw Hall of Fame, Published by the Saginaw Hall of Fame, 2000. (In reference to Wellington R. Burt)

GUTTLEBEN, Daniel, The Sugar Tramp – 1954 printed by Bay Cities Duplicating Company, San Francisco, California

LE CUREUX, KEITH, Albee Township History, Saginaw, County, Michigan, Chapter V, Prairie Farm.

BETZOLD, Michael, Detroit Free Press Magazine, December 26, 1993, Utopia Revisited – an article describing the history of the Prairie Farm.

Copyright, 2009, All Rights Reserved

About the Author: Thomas Mahar served as Executive Vice President of Monitor Sugar Company between 1984 and 1999 and as President of Gala Food Processing, a sugar packaging company, from 1993-1998. He retired in 1999 and now devotes his free time to writing about the history of the sugar industry. He authored, Sweet Energy, The Story of Monitor Sugar Company in 2001, and Michigan's Beet Sugar History (Newsbeet, Fall, 2006).Contact: Thomas Mahar E-mail tkmahar@aol.com

Benjamin Boutell - A True Son of Michigan

Benjamin Boutell, Amelia Boutell and her twin sister, Cornelia M. Duttlinger about 1900



By Thomas Mahar




A flat-bottomed boat lazed along the river’s bank on a summer day in 1860. An observer could be forgiven for not realizing the lone occupant was a youth who would grow to dominate two Michigan industries, log towing and sugar manufacturing and foster a number of companies in other industries that would add immeasurable wealth to Michigan’s developing economy.

The skiff bobbed in a ceaseless to-and-fro motion, influenced by waves that washed against the bank and then receded in accordance with the movement of steamers and sloops that churned the Saginaw River’s channel. Its skipper, sixteen-year-old Benjamin Boutell, sighed in sleepy contentment. The rocking motion of the river lulled him deeper into slumber as he basked in the sun’s warmth, dreaming of sea adventures in which he was the central figure.

He did not hear the sounds of sawing and hammering, the hailing of ships from shore, and other boisterous dock activity common to Bay City, Michigan in 1860. In ten years, the city’s population had exploded from a mere fifty souls to more than three thousand, with more arriving each day from Canada or Detroit to take jobs in one of fifteen sawmills clustered on the riverbank. Before the lumber drew to a close forty years later, thirty thousand people would call Bay City home and more than one hundred sawmills lined the riverbanks from Bay City to Saginaw, twelve miles distant.

His father, Daniel Boutell, owned one of the hotels situated within hailing distance at the southeast corner of Water and Third streets. Not long before it had been the Sherman House. Situated across from the Detroit Steamboat Company’s landing, it was often the first stop for newcomers to the city. Daniel Boutell had moved his family thirty miles north from Birch Run to take over the hotel, and after extensive renovations hung a new shingle near the entrance. Now it was the Boutell House, a home away from home for Great Lakes sailors who were made to feel more like family guests than hotel patrons because many of the Boutells’ nine children shared the hotel with them.

Fascinated by the stories the sailors told, Ben grew to love the river and the great Saginaw Bay, the doorway to the Great Lakes, a doorway he planned to pass through one day. Meanwhile, he earned his way by remaining on call to the Protection Fire Company where he served as first assistant foreman and helped his father at the hotel where he badgered sailors with questions about schooners, sloops, barges, and tugboats. An infectious grin and a sincere interest loosened tongues of sailors who enjoyed Ben’s enthusiasm; they gladly shared accounts of their adventures and knowledge of all things nautical.

Having learned much about the nature of goods that moved from port to port on the Great Lakes, he began to pay special attention to the movement of logs towed by powerful tugboats. The task of moving felled trees to mills situated in one of the state’s principal sawmill towns, Saginaw, Bay City, or Muskegon, was critical to the success of the timber industry. Water transport provided the least costly solution. Logs carved from Michigan’s forests were floated downstream, collected at river mouths, sorted into floating corrals, called “booms,” and towed by tugboats to sawmills that lined the river from Saginaw to Bay City. From forests along Canada’s Georgian Bay shoreline, tugboats towed booms containing thousands of logs across Lake Huron and into the Saginaw Bay for shipment to waiting sawmills.

Tugboat captains faced many perils: sudden storms that would threaten to shatter the delicate lacing of logs that formed the boom, shipboard disasters, exploding boilers, and fires that could leave crews abandoned to chilling water far from rocky shores. The idea of taking the helm of such a craft fired the imagination of the hotelkeeper’s son.

His ambition gained impetus in his twenty-first year when fire destroyed the Boutell House. Dan Boutell fought the blaze until only smoldering rubble remained. His lungs seared by smoke, he declined in health until death claimed him the following year. The family’s livelihood in peril, Ben immediately signed on as a full-time sailor on the steam tug Wave. Within the year, he was the Wave’s mate and in the following year earned papers conferring upon him the responsibilities of a ship’s master.

As Captain Boutell, he assumed command of the Ajax, a steam tug that had lately become the property of the First National Bank of Bay City. The bank had acquired it in the manner banks often acquire assets – via defaulted notes. The twenty-two-year-old novice captain enlisted the aid of an engineer named Samuel Jones, whose salary, like the captain's, was conditional upon the ship's revenue, and a cook he addressed with affection as Aunt Kitty and who possessed both an impressive girth and a disposition for adventure. Ben, Jones, and Aunt Kitty ran the tug that fall with Ben handling with equal ease mundane chores such as cutting wood for its boiler and management of the boat’s business. The trio cleared for the owners $6,000 (about $84 thousand in 2009 dollars), giving the young captain a reputation as a can-do ship’s master with a first-rate knowledge of the Great Lakes.

Bold competence won the attention of Captain William Mitchell, master of the tug Union. Mitchell admired the rangy youth with the engaging smile whose energy seemed to expand to meet any challenge. The two became fast friends and business partners, acquiring over time a fleet of tugboats, barges, schooners, and freight haulers that eventually numbered more than fifty. Boutell organized great rafts containing as much as four million board feet of lumber, making him the single greatest hauler of timber of the lumber era. Altogether, log rafting and other towing work for his tugs employed the services of five hundred people. He counted himself among them. Even as his assets and his reputation grew, he stayed on at the helm of one tug or another, five years alone as captain of the Annie Moiles, until finally responsibilities created by his rapidly growing wealth kept him on shore.

Although Ben never left behind the boy who probed the riverbanks aboard a small skiff, the capital he amassed as boat owner and captain on Lake Michigan, Lake Superior, Lake Huron, and the Georgian Bay would eventually generate additional fortunes. When Ben Boutell, William Mitchell, and future partner, Peter Smith linked themselves to the lumber industry they had tied themselves to a star that would rise but a little distance before flaming out. When the white pine forests melted under the onslaught of axes and saws, the need for Boutell’s tugs disappeared. For a time it was his plan to continue where he had begun, hauling logs from Canada. However, prohibitive duties ended any hope of profiting from Canadian timber. With a sinking heart, Ben, who once transported an average of one hundred million board feet of timber in a season, watched his boats loiter at the docks.

So it was that Captain Benjamin Boutell, in 1897, at the age of fifty-three, found himself wealthy, but unemployed and eager for new opportunities. Though he no longer was the trim youth that inspired legends, he was still affable, easy-going, and, as always, attired in rumpled clothing. A shaggy moustache was all that was remained of a once prominent beard, and though he paid close attention to the weekly sermon at the Madison Avenue Methodist Episcopal Church, he peppered his speech with impious phrases that would have brought deep furrows to its minister’s features had they been uttered in his presence. A general portliness, the outcome of too many dinners prepared under the direction of Amelia, his wife of nearly thirty years, robbed him of his once athletic build. Though the body had become rounder, fuller, and less capable of single-handedly managing a schooner’s rigging, the inquisitive youth was still present in eyes that sparkled at the suggestion of adventure.

With the passing of the lumber era, some thirty years after Ben towed his first raft of logs, many who had garnered riches in Michigan’s forests departed, carrying their wealth to distant cities. Ben Boutell stayed put, reinvesting most of his wealth in Michigan. He opened his mind to possibilities in many industries. Knowing little about any of them, insatiable curiosity guided his direction. Soon, he owned major shares of coalmines, shipping companies, machinery shops, cement factories, banks, a telephone company, foundries, and sugar factories. His interests spanned the country from Boston where he owned sea-going barges to Redwood City, California, where he co-founded that state’s first Portland cement factory. He eventually served as an officer or director in thirty-two companies, nine of them in Michigan’s beet sugar industry. He also co-founded the Colorado and Canadian beet sugar industries, presiding over two sugar companies in Colorado and serving on the boards of two Canadian companies that later became the foundation for the Canadian-Dominion Sugar Company. Additionally, he owned large farms where he grew sugarbeets as well as a 4,000-acre ranch in the state’s northern reaches.


His sugar interests alone would have been enough to keep two or three executives busy year around. No single individual in Michigan devoted as much of his wealth and time to the state’s evolving sugarbeet industry as did Captain Benjamin Boutell. He was one of the founders of Michigan’s first beet sugar company, Michigan Sugar Company, where he served as a director and vice-president. He served in similar capacities at the Bay City Sugar Company. He co-founded the Saginaw Sugar Company where he served as treasurer and held a directorship. He was president of the Lansing Sugar Company and treasurer of the Marine City Sugar Company and held directorships in the Mount Clemens, Carrollton, and Menominee sugar companies.

The vast Sugar Trust, an organization that held the country’s supply of sugar in a steel grip for decades did not have his support. As the Trust grew in power, he sold his stock in companies that fell under its control and invested in independent companies, maintaining distance from a form of business organization that was losing favor in America.

Captain Boutell commanded the deck of sailing sloops and boardrooms with equal ease, routinely making investments that impelled the formation of companies employing hundreds. But, when he passed through the portal of his home, he entered a matriarchal society governed by his wife, Amelia, and her identical twin sister, Cornelia.

Amelia Charlotte Duttlinger and her sister were born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1850 or 1851. Tragedy came early to the twins. Their father died when they were three-months old, causing their mother, Catharine, to move to Bay County. There, she operated a hotel with the aid of the twins when they were old enough, two servants, and a bartender. Among the guests in 1869 was Ben Boutell, a dashing young sailor who at twenty-four had already become the stuff of legends and a man of means. That he was a catch surely did not escape the notice of Amelia and Cornelia, or their widowed mother.


Amelia was possessed of a genial personality and good looks and although physically identical to her twin sister, she somehow presented a difference to Ben. Perhaps it was friendlier disposition and an unwary attitude that brought merriment to her eyes and the kind of smile that will linger in a man's memory. Her auburn hair cascaded long and full across her shoulders, ending in ringlets that bounced with each step she took. Cornelia seemed, by comparison, more guarded and often critical of the hotel’s guests, many of whom fell short of her rigid standards of dress and deportment. Amelia’s non-stop references to Ben began to sound like wedding bells to Cornelia. She hinted at a budding love affair of her own.

The courtship was brief, shaped by the busy schedule of a Great Lakes seaman. The two were in love and although the term had yet to come into usage, they were soul mates. Each had lost a father at a young age, each had spent formative years bearing adult responsibilities assisting in the operation of a hotel, and each aspired to a life measured in achievement. The marriage occurred on December 22, 1869, after the sea lanes closed for the winter. Ben and Amelia looked forward to a long honeymoon that would end when the Great Lakes thawed in March.

Before the honeymoon was over, however, Cornelia, in great distress, landed on their doorstep to recuperate from a tragic turn of events in her love life. After that, the sisters became inseparable; one would go nowhere without the other. At Amelia’s insistence, Ben bought two of everything, coats, dresses, and hats monogrammed to identify the twin to whom it belonged. In a nod of acceptance of the permanence of Cornelia’s presence in their lives, he named one of his ore-carrying barges “Twin Sisters.” The twin he loved he called “Meil”.

The only distinction between the twins was a small mole on Amelia’s neck behind one ear. Ben, however, possessed a secret method for distinguishing one from the other: Amelia’s features generally depicted contentment while Cornelia’s aspect was sour and irritable. The birth of three sons, Frederick, William, and Bennie, gave special purpose to Amelia’s life while supervision of their development into cultured gentlemen in the coarse riverside lumber town became a special mission for Cornelia. She had surrendered any hope of doing the same for her brother-in-law. His bulk combined with restlessness made every delicate object within his reach vulnerable to breakage; teacups, spectacles, jewelry clasps, and fine furniture seemed to fracture and break in his presence.

The sisters determined that the time had come for the captain to establish a residence sized and embellished in a manner that properly announced the breadth of his life’s achievements. At their behest, he purchased four contiguous lots in Bay City on Fifth and Madison Streets, a block off Center Avenue. Today, Center Avenue reveals a spectacular display of late nineteenth and early twentieth century residential architecture for which it has won a place on the National Register of Historic Places. For Bay City’s prominent citizens in the 1890’s and the next half-century, it was the right place to live. Lumbermen and leaders in beet sugar, coal, shipbuilding, and other industries built stylish homes that reflected their substantial fortunes.

Phillip C. Floeter, a distinguished architect who had a few years earlier designed the Trinity Episcopal Church was engaged to draw up the plans and then build a mansion calculated to dwarf Center Avenue homes in both magnitude and ornamentation.

Floeter imported Italian tile and marble for eleven fireplaces and ordered substantial quantities of mahogany, maple, birch, and pine for both the house and interior paneling. The parlor showed Ben’s love of the Great Lakes. It was in the shape of the bow of a boat, and at the far end stood a floor-to-ceiling mirror flanked on each side by tall, mirrored cabinets. Another tribute to the Great Lakes–bright stones carried from Lake Erie and installed within a front looking gable--attracted the attention of passers-by. Panels covered the interior walls to a height of five feet with the area above them covered first with canvas and then decorated with gold leaf. Lighting fixtures were made of sterling silver.

In addition to storage rooms, the basement contained a kitchen and dining rooms where Ben entertained business associates and friends who preferred to puff on cigars while paying Bacchic tribute to one another, activities prohibited elsewhere on the premises. Two private balconies opened off bedrooms on the second floor, and a first-floor porch ran the full length of two sides of the house. From that vantage point, one could glimpse the river and hear the sigh of sloops passing in the night. The house was painted green with white trim--with marine paint, of course. A large barn, which housed four driving horses and a carriage, stood behind the house.

Boutell was low-keyed. He avoided the limelight often favored by business executives and community leaders, foregoing speeches, the holding of public office or any of the other trappings that accompany success. With the exception of his mansion, a concession to his wife to whom he refused nothing, he avoided public displays of wealth. He was more likely to give encouragement to children who congregated on his spacious lawn where he built a toboggan slide for them, than to engage in politics and more likely to spend time with his family than at business conventions.

January in the Saginaw Bay region is a cold time. The ice thickens on the bay and the river’s pace slows to a crawl and then finally stops altogether. Each day brings forewarning of colder days to come as winter settles in to hold the region in a cold embrace until spring. It was 1902 and Bay City was no longer imprisoned by frozen waterways five months of each year; railroads now allowed travel to those places where Ben did business. He took frequent advantage of them to travel within the United States and Canada where he attended boards of directors meetings and shareholder meetings or to appraise new investment opportunities.

When he returned from one such excursion in late January 1902, he entered his home where he found Amelia and Cornelia together in the sitting room. Cornelia’s hands were busy knitting a shawl, one of many gifts she and Amelia made throughout the year for family and church members. Amelia’s hands were in her lap, one folded over the other, an unusual posture for Amelia, who, like Ben, was generally busy from dawn to dusk.

Something else captured his attention, sending a cold shiver along his spine. The twins were no longer identical! True, their dresses, as always, were the same, fashionable Edwardian afternoon dresses, black, and in keeping with strait-laced Methodist views, unadorned with jewelry. Each now wore her hair pulled back tightly and secured in a chignon at the back of the head. But, Amelia’s features had changed during the few weeks he had been away, or at any rate, he noticed an accumulation of changes that had escaped his attention when he saw her each day.


She had lost weight, her face was drawn and narrow; her shoulders sloped as if in defeat, and, worst of all, the luster had left her eyes. He swung his head to his left and noticed a pair of kid gloves sitting on the hallstand and droplets of moisture on the floor. Despite their settled appearance, he guessed the two had reached home shortly before him and had hurriedly arranged themselves to deceive him into believing they had been there the daylong. Knitting needles flashed in Cornelia’s busy hands. Her gaze flew first to Amelia, and then to Ben. Amelia made as if to rise to greet her husband but Ben, seeing her distress, rushed across the small space between them and took her in his arms.

He summoned specialists to her side and took her to those who could not visit her at home. She grew worse. Cancer was the sixth cause of death in Michigan in that period, behind tuberculosis, heart disease, pneumonia, cholera, and influenza. Despite Ben’s ferocious efforts to save her, she grew steadily worse.

By Thanksgiving, Ben realized Amelia understood the end was near. He drew his chair close to her bed when with a frail motion she beckoned him to draw close. With a voice too thin to travel more than a few feet, she made known her final wishes. Cornelia, she reminded him, had been a part of her life from the moment of her birth and a part of Ben’s from the moment of his marriage. She implored him to marry Cornelia to protect the family's wealth which would be threatened with division or total loss in the event Benjamin married another. Marry, Cornelia, she said, and it all stays together where it belongs.

She gripped Ben’s hand with the little strength that remained and asked that he promise her now. In thirty-three years of marriage, Ben had yielded to her every wish; he saw no reason to demur now. He made the promise, then smiled and told her it was an easy promise to make because she would be right as rain by Christmas, at the latest!

Amelia died five days later on November 25, 1902. Ben kept his deathbed vow and married Cornelia fourteen months later on February 11, 1904.

Ben increased the pace of his activities, forming companies, expanding others, and devoting additional time to community projects, such as the founding of the YMCA and the YWCA, serving as a church trustee, and giving freely of his time and money to local needs.


In April 1912, he attended a meeting of the stockholders of Wallaceburg Sugar Company in Wallaceburg, Ontario. At the meeting’s conclusion, he arrived at the railway station in Chatham for the return trip just as the engine was warming. Black smoke billowed from the smokestack. The chugging engine seemed to shout Hurry! Hurry! The conductor, impatient to have a last-second boarder, leaned forward as if to remove the small wooden step used by passengers to board the train. Ben broke into a lope. Just as he grasped the bar that would allow him to swing aboard, the train suddenly lurched forward. He held on with one hand, scrambling to board but lacked the strength to complete the maneuver. He loosened his grip and fell to the platform. At first, he believed himself no more than badly shaken. Upon returning home, he began to feel discomfort, then pain, then agony. Within a short time, he fell into a semi-conscious state from which he drifted into death on October 26, 1912.

When Benjamin Boutell passed into history, Michigan lost a member of a cadre of daring men and women born near the time the state came into existence. He injected vigor and a risk-taking attitude into the frontier state making of himself a pioneer on the Great Lakes and in Michigan’s farm fields and in the fostering of several industrial concerns. When Michigan faced economic distress during the phasing out of the lumber industry, he ignored safer paths and plunged instead, into new industries that expanded economic opportunity in Michigan’s smaller cities at the risk of uncertain financial return for himself while others in his situation carried profits won in Michigan to distant, safer harbors, New York, Cleveland, Boston. For that alone, he is remembered as a true son of Michigan.

Sources:
Butterfield, George, Bay County Past and Present, Centennial Edition, George Butterfield, Board of Education, Bay City, Michigan ,1957, pages 117, 195 (photo of mansion), 89, 118, and 142.
Gansser, Augustus, History of Bay County, MI and Representative Citizens, Richmond & Arnold, Chicago, IL, 1905, pages 491-2.
Gutleben, Dan, The Sugar Tramp – 1954, Bay Cities Duplicating Co, San Francisco, California, 1954.
Mansfield, J. B. History of the Great Lakes, Vol 1, Freshwater Press, Cleveland, Ohio, 1972
Evening Press, West Bay City, Bay, MI, Friday, 26 Nov 1880, relating to the death of Benjamin Boutell's mother.
Cyclopedia of Michigan: Historical and Biographical Synopsis of General History of the State and Biographical Sketches of Men who have, in their various spheres, contributed toward its development., Western Publishing and Engraving Co., New York and Detroit, 227-8, 230-1, Bay City Public Library, Bay, Michigan
History of the Great Lakes with Illus., J. H. Beers & Co., Chicago, 1899. Vol. II, pages 18-22.
INFLATION ADJUSTMENTS: The pre-1975 data are the Consumer Price Index statistics from Historical Statistics of the United States (USGPO, 1975). All data since then are from the annual Statistical Abstracts of the United States. Recorded at http://www.westegg.com/inflation
MICHIGAN ANNUAL REPORTS, Michigan Archives, Lansing, Michigan

©2009 Thomas Mahar All Rights Reserved.

About the Author:Thomas Mahar served as Executive Vice President of Monitor Sugar Company between 1984 and 1999 and as President of Gala Food Processing, a sugar packaging company, from 1993-1998. He retired in 1999 and now devotes his free time to writing about the history of the sugar industry. He authored, Sweet Energy, The Story of Monitor Sugar Company in 2001.Contact: Thomas Mahar E-mail tkmahar@aol.com

The History of the Sebewaing, Michigan Sugar Factory

By Thomas Mahar

One of the men destined to join the ranks of Michigan's pioneer sugar barons was John C. Liken. He was nearly 70 years old when the idea struck him and already rich beyond the dreams he probably had when he carved barrel staves for a living as an indigent immigrant in New York more than fifty years earlier. By 1900, he operated a big business in a small town that referred to him as the town father because his enterprise created the jobs that brought people to the town.

His annual sales during the years preceding 1900, in modern terms, equated to about $7.5 million. In a combination of enterprises that employed two hundred people, he operated four saw mills primarily engaged in manufacturing barrel staves, many of which he shipped to Germany, two flour mills, a major retail outlet for hardware, dry goods, groceries, and drugs which in 1884 employed nine clerks.

Liken's enterprises were headquartered in a small town in Michigan's "thumb". The town was Sebewaing, a small collection of rustic homes nestled on the east shore of the Saginaw Bay some twenty-five miles northeast of Bay City. Its residents were day laborers who worked at one of Liken's establishments or on one of the surrounding farms, or fished in the great Saginaw Bay that lapped the shores within walking distance of the town.

Sebewaing borrowed its name from the Chippewa word for crooked creek and some of its wealth from the abundant fishing in the bay. Not long before 19th century came to a close, nearby forests fell to swift axes, making room for German settlers who quickly set about the twin tasks of removing stumps and planting crops. By 1900, Liken, now sixty-eight years old, rich and with a son and two sons-in-law to run his enterprises, could have reclined in easy comfort. Instead, he began a plan that would lead to the construction of a sugar factory.

Liken, a native of Lower Saxony in northwestern Germany met Wallburga Kunkle, the woman who would become his wife, in Binghamton, New York. She was a native of Bavaria and bore the name of a canonized nun who traveled to Germany from England in 748 to perform good works. St. Wallburga became the patron saint of plagues, famines and a host of other discomforts, including dog bites. John Liken had arrived in Binghamton after working for his passage aboard a sailing vessel. Once in America, he put his training as a cooper to work while at the same time studying with an observant eye the business practices and opportunities in his new country with occasional time outs for Walburga.

After the birth of their fourth child, Emma, in 1864, who joined her siblings, Mary, born in 1856, Hannah born in 1858, and Charles, born in 1859, John and Walburga moved the family to Sebewaing, a Lutheran settlement that was attracting fishermen, farmers and timber men. The town’s population upon his arrival in 1865 was insufficient to proclaim it a village, but with the arrival of John Liken, that was about to change. He established a sawmill where he made barrel staves. Later, he would develop retail outlets, a creamery, granaries, and ships, incorporating in one person a source for all the goods and services required by the local farming community. The cream and crops, he placed on boats and shipped some thirty miles along the Saginaw Bay shoreline to Bay City, a bustling and growing city where the daily demand for groceries grew apace with its burgeoning population. In was in this connection, shipping, that he became acquainted with ship owner Captain Benjamin Boutell and it was through Captain Boutell that he would learn about sugar opportunities.

The hamlet grew into a village and the town folk began to think of Liken as the town father. Having brought two daughters and a son into the community, who like their father were all of good form, good health, and good cheer, it wasn’t unexpected that the Likens began to add substantially to the population. Mary took for a husband, Richard Martini and a few years later, Hannah allowed a youthful Christian Bach to turn her head (In later times, Christian adopted his middle name, Fred as his given name of preference. He appears in the Michigan sugar chronicles authored by Daniel Gutleben as C.F. Bach.) Charles and his wife, Elizabeth settled into the community to take up management of his father’s affairs.

John Liken had departed his Oldenburg home at the age of eighteen after completing a four-year apprenticeship in the cooperage trade. He would have known of sugar beets because of that experience and certainly would have been aware that men from his homeland had been enjoying some success with them in Michigan's Bay County where three factories were then in operation and one more was underway and yet another was under construction in Saginaw.

Altogether, a total of eleven beet factories would soon pour sugar and profits into Michigan towns if one believed the hoopla created by railroads and others who would profit from the construction of factories. The excitement that had been stirring farmers and investors across the state seeped into Sebewaing. Liken saw no need to drum up support by the usual methods, holding town meetings, enlisting editors of local newspapers, hiring bands and front men to call upon the farmers. He was convinced of the need for a beet sugar factory and since a good portion of the local wealth resided in his coffers, he saw no need to persuade others to take up the cause. The Likens possessed sufficient resources to build a factory.

He formed an ad hock committee consisting of his son Charles, Richard Henry Martini, the husband of his daughter Hannah, and daughter Mary’s husband, Christian Fred Bach. All three had held important positions in Liken’s enterprises for many years and all were in their late 30’s, thus steeped in experience. In addition, the three resided next to one another on Center Street in Sebewaing, with Martini at Number 69, Charles next door at 68, and Bach at Number 67, thus the trio could convene at leisure and without formality. Should he and his committee approve the idea, the plan would go forward without the usual sale of stock to community members. It did not require a great amount of research on the part of the committee. They had plenty of arable land at their disposal. The Liken family controlled one thousand acres on their own account that combined with others, eliminated a need for a rail line to convey beets to a factory situated on Lake Huron’s shore. They had the financial capacity. John C. had been generous.

Each of his daughters and his son enjoyed full-time servants in their homes and each was well enough off to invest in the new sugar company on their own account and each had demonstrated managerial ability over a long period of time. They had every attribute needed for success in the new industry save one…experience in sugarbeets. News of the activity in Liken’s headquarters leaked into the community at large and inspired some farmers to plant beets, although a completed factory was nearly two years in the future. Those beets, when ready for market, were shipped to Bay City for processing.

Thinking to add the missing ingredient to an otherwise perfect equation for success, John Liken invited Benjamin Boutell and a few of his trusted friends to join in the endeavor. As a consequence, in a short time Liken learned first-hand, how the camel’s nose under the tent fable came into existence. Boutell, no doubt delighted that his expertise was in greater demand than his money, quickly enlisted men of wealth and experience. Among them was John Ross, who would soon become treasurer of the German-American Sugar Company, the last of four beet sugar factories built in Bay County. Next, came lumbermen Frederick Woodworth, William Smalley and William Penoyar, and a ship owner named William Sharp. When men of the stature of Ben Boutell and Penoyar signaled their interest, the floodgates opened; more men of wealth clamored for a stake in the new company. A pair of Saginaw attorneys Watts S. Humphrey and Thomas Harvey climbed aboard as did George B. Morley, legendary grain dealer and banker. Rasmus Hanson, a wealthy lumberman from Grayling, and future president of the German-American Sugar Company, bought in as did William H. Wallace, a quarry operator in nearby Bay Port.

Unwittingly, Liken in attracting investors from Saginaw and Bay City, brought together two distinct groups which could be described as two separate circles of influence. Boutell’s circle consisted of Bay County investors, Woodworth, Ross, Smalley, Sharp and Penoyar. George Morley’s circle included James MacPherson, Humphrey, Harvey, and William H. Wallace, all Saginaw residents, although Wallace was a native of nearby Port Hope and had been a long term resident of Bay Port, a village snugging the shoreline thirteen miles northeast of Sebewaing. In the wings was Ezra Rust, a wealthy Saginaw resident who had won a fortune in the lumber industry. While all of the Bay County investors had lumber interests, of the Saginaw group only MacPherson had a lumber background. The two circles would take up the sport of in-fighting once the new company got underway.

Representatives of what amounted to three distinct groups, Boutell’s Bay City contingent, Morley’s Saginaw faction, and John Liken’s family, gathered in Watts Humphrey’s Saginaw office in July 1901 to take up the matter of organization. Humphrey’s fame would come not from sugarbeet processing but from the fact that his then 12-year old son, George M. Humphrey, would one day achieve stature as the Secretary of the Treasury under President Dwight D. Eisenhower, serving from 1953 until 1957.

Wasting no time, the organizers had at hand, four representatives of construction firms specializing in building beet processing factories. They were Fuehrman & Hapke, E. H. Dyer, Kilby Manufacturing, and Oxnard Construction. It was expected that as soon as the shares were taken up by the attendees, a contract would be awarded to one of the four bidders. To Benjamin Boutell and his Bay City group, there was only one bid of any interest to them and that was the one from Kilby Manufacturing for $900,000. The price was a hefty $1,500 per ton of beet slicing capability, nearly double the $850 per ton price tag of the Essexville factory and almost $600 more per ton than the price for the German-American Sugar Company factory that was currently under construction. Oxnard’s bid of slightly more than $1,800 per ton (including, as usual, a Steffens process) and Dyer’s next to the lowest bid of $1,416 per ton were beaten out by Fuehrman & Hapke’s winning bid of $1,320 per ton for a total price of $792,000.

The first order of business called for the election of officer and directors, a normally placid affair when the company founders knew one another as well as did the gathering in Humphrey’s office. Representatives of each of the three main shareholder groups secured positions. Bay City lumberman, W. C. Penoyar was given the presidency, while Sebewaing’s Christian Bach took on the vice-presidency, and the Saginaw group saw William Baker and Thomas Harvey took the secretary and treasurer seats. Benjamin Boutell and William Wallace joined the executive committee. At the top of the agenda was the matter of deciding on the winning bid for the factory’s construction, which would be, as usual, a full turnkey operation. That’s when the temporary alliance between Bay City, Huron County, and Saginaw County investors fractured.
Boutell’s crowd, said the low bid made no difference, they would accept none other than the one submitted by Kilby. To the Saginaw group, this was tantamount to drawing a line in the sand. They believed firmly in awarding the contract to the lowest bidder. Accordingly, the Sebewaing-Saginaw representatives who controlled three of the officer positions, ignoring the fact that Boutell and his friends controlled 45 percent of the company and that a member of their faction just secured the presidency, gave the nod to Fuehrman & Hapke. Boutell and company recoiling from the suggestion that anyone except Kilby would build a factory in which they had invested, cancelled their stock subscriptions, resigned their positions and withdrew from the board of directors.

The Liken family along with several of the Saginaw investors purchased the newly vacated shares. When the dust settled, Boutell and his co-investors were out and the Saginaw contingent held the controlling interest at 55 percent with control divided between the Morley and Rust families. The Rust family headed by Ezra Rust would leave its mark on the City of Saginaw in the form of a city park and a major thoroughfare bearing its name. Ezra’s confidence in the sugar industry may have stemmed from a stint he served as an engineer in a Cuban sugar mill during his youth. Morley held 5,000 shares in his own name, while various members of the Rust family held 4,000 shares. Family members and friends of John Liken held 45 percent.
The sudden withdrawal of Bay City investors necessitated a second election. The presidency went to Thomas Harvey. John Liken’s son-in-law, Christian Bach, retained the vice-president’s post and a seat at the director’s table. Liken’s son, Charles, accepted an appointment as treasurer but did not win a board seat. William F. Schmitt, a minor stockholder and Christian Bach’s sister Emma’s suitor, became secretary. In time and after having been tested by fire, he would prove that his advancement was owed entirely to his skill, not to his relationship to the Bach family. In 1906, he took charge of the Sebewaing factory which he then guided for six years before leaving the company for a senior position with Continental Sugar Company. Directors, in addition to Harvey and Christian Bach, included William H. Wallace, Watts Humphrey, George Morley, James MacPherson, who replaced Benjamin Boutell, and Richard Martini.

The appointed contractor for the factory’s construction, Henry Theodore Julius Fuehrman, normally addressed as Jules, arrived from New York where he had constructed a similar factory at Lyons and before that, Pekin, Illinois. He appeared in September for the groundbreaking ceremony. With him was his partner, Theodore Hapke who won high regard from area farmers of German extraction because of his knowledge of sugarbeets and his ability to explain the subject in the mother tongue.

Fuehrman had been closely involved with the construction of a beet factory in Grand Island, Nebraska, which to his good fortune happened to be in the place after Germany that he called home. He was the only son of Henry and Tulia Fuehrman of Brunswick, Germany. Beginning at the age of fourteen, he served an apprenticeship in the mason's trade. After deciding to prepare himself for the duties of an architect, he devoted himself to the study of architecture in different polytechnic institutions throughout his native land. When twenty years of age, he entered the Germany Army, serving one year, and in 1882, he emigrated to America where after spending two years in Chicago he settled in Grand Island. There he accepted a number of commissions, including the design of the city hall, a church, a university, and eventually the Oxnard beet sugar factory in Grand Island.

Fuehrman’s success attracted the prestigious architectural firm of Post & McCord, the firm that built the roof over Madison Square Garden and the large iron frames for the skyscrapers that dotted Broadway and Wall Street and in 1931 would construct the world’s tallest skyscraper, the Empire State Building. Post & McCord partnered with the equally prestigious American Bridge Company, thus the Sebewaing factory’s formation was destined to be of solid construction. With William H. Wallace serving on the board of directors, the question of whether the foundation was going to be made of solid stones or the new building material, concrete, was resolved without discussion. The stones came from Wallace’s quarry, thirteen miles distant where they were carved by his expert workmen into squares that conformed to the architect’s specifications. Crushed stone from the same source made roadways for hauling equipment and later, beets to the factory. Already the community was enjoying the fruits of the presence of a sugar factory, improved roads and a richer economy as workers discovered gainful employment on the many work crews needed to fashion a factory that would soon win recognition as one of the largest of its kind in the nation.

Emile Brysselbout, Fuehrman and Hapke’s newest partner, was also on hand. Brysselbout’s credentials included the recently constructed Charlevoix, Michigan sugarbeet factory and he had supervised the construction of the Essexville factory.
The cornerstone was laid on October 21, 1901 but the absence of qualified engineers delayed construction. Experienced construction engineers had become a premium in a nation that suddenly could not have enough beet sugar factories. Twenty-five beet sugar factories were constructed between 1900 and 1905 of which ten were in Michigan. Adding to the difficulties was Fuehrman’s absence. He had departed for Dresden, Ontario to construct a similar factory for Captain James Davidson, a Bay City magnate who had decided to dedicate a portion of his wealth to the beet industry.

By appearances, Davidson’s contract held greater importance for Fuehrman than did Sebewaing’s. William Wallace, noted for always taking a firm hand where one was needed, approached Brysselbout with the insistence that Joseph Eckert be hired. Eckert was a man with a can-do reputation and one who would tolerate no obstacles in the path to his goal. Eckert had just finished an assignment at Mendall Bialy’s West Bay City Sugar Company where he had increased productivity more than one-third.

Gutleben relates that when Eckert arrived in Sebewaing, he found nature busy at the task of reclaiming the site. Weeds and wild flowers occupied the space intended for a factory. The few columns that had been erected on Wallace’s stone foundations were poised as if ready to fall to earth. Worse, there was no gear on hand to correct the steelwork in place or to install the balance of it. Fuehrman promised a steam engine but its delivery would have to wait until the steel erection work in Dresden was finished. It was April. The farmers wanted to know if they should plant a beet crop. “Plant ‘em!” exclaimed Eckert who then placed an order for the delivery of a steam engine to be charged against Fuehrman & Hapke’s account. Wallace backed the credit. Fuehrman’s complexion turned the color of spoiled liver during his next visit; he fired his innovative engineer for insubordination. Wallace accompanied by Brysselbout turned the decision around in a hurried meeting with Fuehrman.

One of the advantages of having Brysselbout and Eckert on staff was their ability to draw men of similar skill. Brysselbout, inspired by Eckert’s enthusiasm and unquestioned role as chief project engineer after Fuehrman’s failed effort to fire him, secured experienced and highly educated operators, men like Hugo Peters, an 1898 graduate of Leipzig University who would become Sebewaing’s first factory superintendent. James Dooley soon followed. He carried a reputation for practical application of scientific principles and a cool head during emergencies. Eckert attracted outstanding engineers such as Eugene Stoeckly and Pete Kinyon, a master at erecting the steal grids that became the frames for the factories. Nearby farmers, long experienced with neighbors William Wallace, “Bill” to all, and John Liken, both hard driving can-do business leaders, had full confidence that a factory would stand in their midst at harvest time, as promised. They set about planting the second sugarbeet crop in Huron County with results that would prove fortuitous for themselves and for the investors.

When the trees began to blaze red and orange and cool dawn breezes dried the morning dew before farmers stepped from their doors, the county’s first sugarbeet crop waited in neat soldiery rows for men, women and even children to approach them. A lifter, a device designed to loosen the beet from earth’s hold, operated by the farmer, would proceed across the field at a walking pace. Harvesters would follow, pulling the beets from the ground then knocking two of them together to loosen soils and then casting them into a pile to await topping. Eventually, automated motor driven machines would perform the task, a task enhanced by pre-topping and then cleaning of the beets via a shaking system and dumped into waiting trucks. But for now, it was brute work.

On October 10, 1902, it was done. The main building sixty-seven by 258 feet and five floors comprising approximately sixty thousand square feet, made of brick and filled with the most modern equipment available to the industry, opened for business. In a town where the average home consisted of fewer than seven hundred square feet of space, it was an awesome presence. It was one of the grandest and largest buildings constructed in the American Midwest up to that time.

It was agreed that only one man in all of Huron County deserved the honor of delivering the first load of beets to the factory, the man whose dream set off the chain of events that led to the magnificent building now standing at the end of the town’s main street. He was John C. Liken. His family had gathered round two months before on August 9, to celebrate his seventieth birthday and now at an age beyond that which men commonly set aside for the cessation of physical labor, he guided a team of four horses drawing a gaily decorated wagon brimming with sugarbeets onto the scales. The Liken family, standing beside the constructors, Bill Wallace and a contingent from Saginaw, applauded the advance of the high-stepping horses and the contented Mr. Liken. Within the week, Hugo Peter conducted an operational test, allowing only water through the factory to test the readiness as well as the harmony of the equipment. After making a few adjustments to correct weaknesses detected during the water test, he ordered the slicing of beets to begin on October 27.

The farmers delivered beets containing 13.23 percent sugar of which they harvested nearly seven tons to the acre. According to Gutleben’s history, the factory yielded more than 91,000 hundredweight of sugar on an extraction rate of seventy-one per cent giving it returns greater than from the West Bay City’s factory, the Essexville factory, the Bay City Sugar Company and certainly Benton Harbor, Kalamazoo, and the first year of operation at the Caro factory. The operational results mirrored those of the Kilby built Alma factory. Financial results, however, were far greater because the 48,250 tons of beets delivered by Sebewaing growers exceeded by two-hundred fifty percent the 19,100 tons delivered by Alma growers for that factory’s first campaign. Sebewaing growers delivered the greatest number of beets delivered to a single factory up until that time, loud evidence of the confidence Huron County farmers placed in Wallace, Liken, and Bach, confidence, as events revealed, that was not misplaced. Estimated profits for Sebewaing’s first year of operation approximated $140,000, 26 percent on sales and providing a 17 percent return on investment.

Soon, two important personages representing the American Sugar Refining Company called on Bill Wallace. They were Henry Niese, head of operations and W. B. Thomas from the company’s treasury department (Thomas would become president of American Sugar Refining on December 20, 1907 following the death of Henry O. Havemeyer earlier that month.). Their mission was to scout candidates for admission to the Sugar Trust. The visit occasioned a significant change in the company’s make-up when Charles B. Warren, a Detroit attorney who represented the interests of the American Sugar Refining Company arrived shortly afterward to offer an investment of $325,000. The company issued an additional thirty-five thousand shares of stock of which he acquired 32,500; other shareholders each increased their stake by approximately 8.3 percent, effectively giving Warren a 50 percent interest in the company with the other half in the hands of the Liken family (24 percent) and Morley’s Saginaw investors (26 percent).

The bloom of youth still graced the cheeks of Charles Beecher Warren when he appeared in Sebewaing like a godsend to drop what would amount to in current dollars nearly seven million dollars in a start-up company managed entirely by local investors. His youth disguised a young man bearing a sound education and a steely resolve to make something of himself. Before his time passed, he would become the US ambassador to two nations (Japan in 1921 and Mexico in 1924), write the regulations for conscription during World War I, head a major law firm and direct the affairs of a number of corporations.

In 1903 when visiting Sebewaing, however, he resembled not so much the power broker and respected lawyer he would become but instead, a pleasant young man with a pocket full of cash. He was fresh from Saginaw where he persuaded the owners of the Carrollton factory to take his cash in exchange for a 60 percent stake in the factory that came into existence when Boutell’s Bay City crowd parted company with the Sebewaing investors. He would, over the course of a few years, dispense more than three and half million dollars in Michigan alone ($60 million in current dollars) while acquiring sugar companies that would immediately report to the New York office of the American Sugar Refining Company—not bad for someone who had been taking rooms in a boarding house situated near Cass Avenue in Detroit in 1900.

His rise to power began six years earlier when he was appointed associate counsel for the US government in hearings before the joint high commission in the Bering Sea controversy with Great Britain. The matter concerned England’s perceived right to harvest seals notwithstanding the United States opinion that extinction would surely follow that practice. By 1900, he was a partner in the law firm of Shaw, Warren, Cady & Oakes a Detroit firm representing a number of banks and manufacturing firms, chief among them the American Sugar Refining Company. A few years hence, he would adopt the title of president of Michigan Sugar Company, a position he would hold for 19 years in addition to the presidency of a sugar company in Iowa and another in Minnesota. During that same time period he returned to the international arena once again where his carefully watched performance won accolades from imminent lawyers in Europe and America. This time, he appeared on behalf of the United States before the Hague tribunal to resolve a dispute between the United States and England concerning North Atlantic fishing rights.

The son of a small town newspaper editor, Robert Warren, he listed Bay City as his birthplace, but because of the nature of his father’s profession, moved from time to time while growing up, always within Michigan. He graduated first from Albion College then attended and graduated from the University of Michigan before attending the Detroit College of Law where he graduated LL.B. At the Detroit College of Law, he studied under Don. M. Dickenson and then joined Dickenson’s firm when he was admitted to the bar in 1893, the year he graduated. A few years later, he joined John C. Shaw and William B Cady in organizing a separate law firm, a firm he would eventually head throughout his career. Early on, displaying an understanding of the value of macro management, he tended to see to the installation of experienced managers and then leave them unmolested as they carried out the day to day requirements of conducting business.
Much as Caro served as a training ground for factory operators, Sebewaing acted as a school for factory managers who were sent throughout America to beet and cane factories owned by American Sugar Refining Company and others. Hugo Peters moved on to Dresden to oversee James Davidson’s operation and then took similar positions in Idaho, Utah, California and even the West Indies. In 1920, Peters turned his attention to spectro-photometric analysis for the US Bureau of Standards, making serious contributions to color analysis. Jim Dooley stayed on as manager at Sebewaing for a few years then headed operations for all of Michigan Sugar Company when it came into existence in 1906. Wilfred Van Duker, Sebewaing’s first chief chemist, dedicated the larger portion of his career to improving cane milling in Hawaii. There, he eventually managed four sugar estates. Richard Henry Martini became General Agricultural Superintendent for Michigan Sugar Company and Henry Pety moved on to Utah for a superintendency before returning to Michigan to manage the Mount Pleasant factory. The Sebewaing factory continued to expand by adding physical structures and equipment in the form of diffusion towers, automated affairs that replaced the older battery operations, evaporators, modern centrifugals, storage bins and other equipment that caused the daily beet slicing capacity to gradually expand from 600 tons per day to more than 5,000 tons per day.

Sources:
Estimated profits for the first year of operation: Records did not survive. The author determined an estimated profit by applying an estimated selling price of $5.12 for each one hundred pounds to the total hundredweight available for sale and then deducted costs estimated at$3.57 per one hundred pounds.

GUTTLEBEN, Daniel, The Sugar Tramp – 1954 p. 182 concerning purchase of sugar factories by the Sugar Trust, p. 177 concerning organization of Sebewaing Sugar and operating results, printed by Bay Cities Duplicating Company, San Francisco, California

MICHIGAN ANNUAL REPORTS, Michigan Archives, Lansing, Michigan:
Sebewaing Sugar 1903, 1904
Sebewaing Lumber, 1901, 1904
Bay Port Fish, 1901

Saginaw Courier Herald, July 11, 1901 – reporting on the meeting of stockholders of the newly formed Sebewaing Sugar Company.

Portrait and biographical album of Huron County:
John C. Liken, Christian F. Bach, Richard Martini

U.S. Census reports for Sebewaing, 1900, 1910

Copyright, 2009, Thomas Mahar, All Rights Reserved

About the Author: Thomas Mahar served as Executive Vice President of Monitor Sugar Company between 1984 and 1999 and as President of Gala Food Processing, a sugar packaging company, from 1993-1998. He retired in 1999 and now devotes his free time to writing about the history of the sugar industry. He authored, Sweet Energy, The Story of Monitor Sugar Company in 2001, and Michigan's Beet Sugar History (Newsbeet, Fall, 2006).Contact: Thomas Mahar E-mail tkmahar@aol.com

How a Governor Stopped the Beet Sugar Industry in Its Tracks (The Story of the White Pigeon Sugar Manufactory)

Historians generally agree that Michigan Sugar Company constructed the first beet sugar factory built in Michigan in 1898 in Essexville, a suburb of Bay City, Michigan. It isn’t entirely true. The first beet sugar manufactured in the United States occurred simultaneously in the states of Massachusetts and Michigan in 1839. The earlier Michigan effort preceded the Essexville endeavor by sixty years but was doomed to failure when a future governor declared that Michigan was unsuitable for growing sugarbeets.

By the 1830s, the new European practice of extracting sugar identical to cane sugar from beets had captured the interest of like-minded small groups of investors in Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and Michigan. The latter group took the name “White Pigeon” after the town in which the company was organized when establishing the White Pigeon Sugar Manufactory.

The Michigan and Massachusetts enterprises predated the construction of factories in Michigan beginning in 1898 that today provide a direct annual contribution of approximately $298 million to the Michigan economy. Adding the indirect effects, the total contribution to business activity approaches nearly one billion dollars annually. Those first factories averaged five tons of sliced sugarbeets per day, an amount processed in less than sixty seconds in today’s modern factories.

World Governments Open the Door to Free Trade

Early experiments in sugarbeet processing in America were directly related to the formative stages of a bold new economic paradigm taking root in Europe—one which held that commerce and free trade between nations might generate more revenue for governments and more prosperity for the governed than simple taxation. For commerce to demonstrate its superior power as an economic driver, governments dissolved two pivotal institutions, protectionism and slavery.

The realization that commerce could replace taxation as the fount from which governments would draw their means of support did not, however, come without a price. The price was war, actually a series of wars that began with the American Revolution and ended with the American Civil War. The leaders of America’s Sons of Liberty, those who first raised the specter of war against England, were men engaged in commerce as traders, warehouse owners, bankers, and lawyers. Their goal was to put an end to trade practices that favored England to the disadvantage of the colonies and to taxation that either limited or prohibited trade. The French Revolution, hard on the heels of the American Revolution, similarly began as a tax revolt before blazing out of control into a bloodbath that turned that nation’s aristocracy into fugitives from the guillotine.

When presenting the Declaration of Independence, the thirteen colonies listed among injuries experienced at the hand of King George III “… cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world” and “imposing Taxes on us without our consent.” The obstacle to fair trade was protectionism, a practice whereby a country uses tariffs or import quotas to shield its internal commerce from competition by more efficient producers.

Protectionism became a pervasive practice in England in the mid-seventeenth century. At that time a series of parliamentary acts controlled trade by decreeing that only British-owned vessels would convey imported goods from Asia, Africa, and America. Worse yet, the British Navigation Act of 1660 specifically prohibited the colonies from shipping tobacco, sugar, cotton, and other named products to any country other than England.

The American colonies had enjoyed a flourishing trade in the enumerated goods with a number of countries, and strict enforcement of these acts would have caused economic ruin. Fortunately, because England lacked sea dominance, its bark was worse than its bite. In addition to financial losses experienced by the colonists, was the idea that the British could so severely affect the fortunes of nearly two million people in the colonies. It rankled. Nonetheless, in succeeding decades England enacted a succession of additional trade suppression measures, including laws that outlawed the export of corn to England, sharply limited the production of some goods outside of England, and prohibited entirely the manufacture of steel in the American colonies.

The harshest suppression on colonial trade was the Molasses Act of 1733, a law that placed prohibitive duties on molasses and sugar deliveries from the French West Indies to the colonies. The measure held potentially dire consequences for the New England colonies where prosperity relied upon the importation of those commodities. Had England the sea power to enforce the act, the colonies would have been left without a market for the flour, lumber, and fish that was exchanged in trade with the French West Indies. America’s war of independence and later the War of 1812 (called by some, the war for “Free Trade and Sailors Rights”) ultimately broke the stranglehold of British protectionism.

One further obstacle to the realization of international fair trade remained. That was the institution of slavery. If governments were to achieve the goal of securing recurring revenues from the manufacture and sale of products—sugar for example—then slavery would have to go the way of protectionist measures.

Those who operated sugar plantations in the world’s tropical and subtropical regions held a marketing advantage in that the labor-intensive process of planting, harvesting, and manufacturing sugar was provided without labor cost other that which was associated with acquiring and maintaining slaves. The terrible human cost notwithstanding, from the point of view of an economist slavery retarded technological advancement of every kind and thus deterred the establishment of sugarbeets in the northern latitudes of Europe and North America.

On the European continent, a twenty-two year struggle between France and England that began in 1793, during which each tried to starve the other of foreign trade, showed the wastefulness of protectionist policies. It was that struggle, however, that gave sugarbeets the opportunity to climb onto the world stage when, in response to an embargo, France began to extract sugar from sugarbeets which until then had been confined to laboratory experiments. For the first time in world history, sugar, the only commodity that grows with equal success in both temperate and tropical regions, could cleanse itself of the twin blemishes of protectionism and slavery. Europeans, having learned during the Napoleonic era, the disadvantages of depending upon imported cane sugar, adopted with enthusiasm the new sugarbeet technology.

Americans Take an Interest in the New European Novelty - Sugar from Beets

Attracted by reports of new settlers that sugarbeets had gained popularity in France, some Pennsylvania investors headed by James Ronaldson organized the Beet Sugar Society of Philadelphia and in 1830 sent James Pedder to France to study the industry. Pedder subsequently shipped six hundred pounds of seed for distribution to farmers near Enfield, Pennsylvania, where for the first time in American history, the sugarbeet was grown. Nonetheless, while Ronaldson and Pedder vigorously promoted the idea, they were unable to develop a sufficient number of adherents to support a manufacturing process.

In Massachusetts, attorney David Lee Child acquired a farm in Northhampton which became the nucleus for the sugar factory he organized in partnership with others. Child visited Europe in 1836 to study the sugarbeet industry. He came away from the experience filled with enthusiasm that led to the founding of the factory in partnership with Edward Church and Maximin Isnard, an early developer of the beet sugar industry in France. Child, however, was handicapped in his effort to persuade prospective investors of the promise he had seen in the European sugarbeet factories because of a reputation for personal improvidence. For an income, he relied upon his wife, Lydia B. Child, at the time the country's foremost woman author who was noted for penning, in addition to more serious works, the still popular poem that begins “Over the river and through the woods to grandfather’s house we go.” Equally troubling was his altruistic preference for defending clients who could not pay a fee--not to mention a six-month stint once spent in jail on a charge of libel.

Perhaps of greater concern to potential creditors was Child’s inclination to take up causes that were ahead of the times or in opposition to public sentiment and then meld these social concerns with his business interests. He fought on the side of Spain in that country's war with France, opposed ill treatment of Native Americans, and protested the annexation of Texas. More pertinent to Child’s promotion of a sugarbeet enterprise, both Childs made known their ardent opposition to slavery and in public speeches, writings, and personal actions amply demonstrated a determination to help dismantle an evil system. Child aimed to secure the freedom of slaves in the South then take them to Massachusetts where he would employ them in his sugar factory, thus relieving the North's dependence on slave-labored cane sugar while at the same time providing a means of independence for freed slaves. Confidence in the Childs couple withered. Lydia’s brilliant writing career dived into oblivion; David’s less spectacular presence in the business community became unwelcome.

David Lee Child’s inability to secure financial support caused the Northhampton sugar factory to close after two seasons of operation. Eventually Child authored a technical book on sugar manufacture, corresponded with other Americans who shared his interest, proposed a school in which he would train technicians, and in 1839 won a silver medal at the Massachusetts State Exposition for the first manufacture of beet sugar in the United States, having produced thirteen hundred pounds of sugar.

The Northhampton factory, short of capital and a credible manager, struggled for two years before closing its doors forever in 1841, ending the dream of David Lee Childs and those who had come to depend upon him. Childs' struggles rung a familiar note in Michigan where investors sought to found an industry that would enjoy success similar to that enjoyed by the French. The White Pigeon firm announced the Niles Intelligencer, that it would commence operations on March 14, 1839, confidently promising the availability of sugar for coffee the following morning.

Michigan – First U.S. Entity to Provide a Sugar bounty

Michigan achieved statehood in January 1837 and immediately found itself in desperate need of an economic underpinning. A tripling of the state's population between 1830 and 1834 caused by the westward movement of New Englanders created new demands for economic activity, demands that would not be met by the state's primary industries, agricultural, mining and fur trapping. It cast about for new industries. One which was showing great potential in Europe was the manufacture of sugar from sugarbeets.

In its 1838 session, the Michigan legislature adopted a bill introduced by Representative Thomas Gidley of Jackson that provided a bounty of two cents for each pound of sugar manufactured from beets in Michigan. The bill was the first of its kind in the United States. (Sponsorship of private industry with public funding was a common practice adopted by several states but would fall into disfavor in a later era and regain favor in still another.) The House of Representatives’ Agriculture and Manufacturing Committee placed Gidley's bill under consideration.

The committee's report stated:

The manufacture of sugar from the beet, has for many years past been considered a subject of great importance, and has directly or indirectly received governmental patronage, from many of the governments of the old world, but has not, until within the last few years excited much attention or interest in this country, from the impression that in the manufacture of sugar, the beet could not come in successful competition with the sugar of the south. Recent experiments, however, in the middle and eastern states, fully demonstrate that such an impression was an erroneous one…. The Committee, from their acquaintance, with the nature of the soil and climate of this state, and from their experience in the growth of the beet, do not hesitate to express the opinion, that no part of the United States, or perhaps of the world is more favorable to the growth of the raw material for the manufacture of beet-sugar, than the greater portion of the state … [Since it is our aim] to be as independent of the other states or countries as possible, and liberally to encourage the agriculture and manufacturing interests of the state …[support is advocated]."

Stimulated by the support of the legislature, investors Chapman Yates, Samuel Chapin, and several others formed the White Pigeon Beet-Sugar Manufactory, the only manufacturing firm of its kind in the United States with the exception of David Lee Child's Northhampton, Massachusetts, factory.

White Pigeon lies on the edge of a vast prairie in St. Joseph County, a few miles north of the Indiana border. In 1837, the year of its formation, White Pigeon was a stopping off point for Indians traveling to Chicago for distributions of treaty goods. Its name honored an Indian chief named Wahbememe, or White Pigeon, who had run several miles on foot in 1830 to warn settlers of an impending attack by an unfriendly tribe, thus saving them from certain destruction. The effort cost him his life. He collapsed from exhaustion and died at the feet of those he had saved.

The nearby prairie supported an abundance of whatever farmers decided to plant: corn, wheat, oats, and, during the years 1838-1841, sugarbeets. Proximity to the rapidly developing Chicago market assured success for farmers and manufacturers. For that reason, many small manufacturing firms would eventually set up shop in or near White Pigeon.

Lucius Lyon, an early observer of the beet industry, believed the White Pigeon experiment relied upon technology expounded by Count Jean Antoine Chaptal (1756-1832), former president of the French sugar commission. If so, the technology was twenty-five years out of date in 1839 when the White Pigeon Sugar Manufactory was constructed.

In 1839, the White Pigeon investors sent John S. Barry to Europe for the purpose of studying and reporting on the prospects for sugarbeets. He visited a number of factories in France, Belgium, and Germany during which he collected information about operating costs, sugar recovery, and the political climate in those countries. An attorney with a reputation for thorough attention to detail, Barry appeared to be ideally suited to the role of investigator. To his credit, this reputation would lead the people of Michigan to elect him governor in 1842. The future governor's lack of business experience, however, and his complete lack of prior knowledge about the properties and economic potential of sugarbeets, put him at a disadvantage when interviewing French sugar manufacturers—with whom he spent the greater part of his time—including many who had become dispirited by the political clout of cane sugar importers who had gained political ascendancy in France. Barry arrived in France at the very moment the French beet sugar industry was confronting governmental pressure to cease domestic production of beet sugar in favor of slave-produced cane sugar. By 1836 there were 436 factories in operation. This alarmed the importers of cane-sugar and led to legislation which was unfavorable to beet sugar producers. This legislation caused the abandonment in 1837 and 1838 of 166 factories. Beet sugar production in France continued to be spasmodic until 1873.

Barry approached his task much in the manner of the cautious attorney taking depositions on behalf of a litigant. He compiled careful notes and wrote memorandums even before leaving the factories he visited and interviewed those he met with the aid of written interrogatories prepared in advance. To his credit, he collected ample information about the operating costs, sugar recovery, and the political climate of the countries he visited. The use to which he put it is another matter.

In forming his opinion, Barry assumed conditions and experiences in Europe would transfer to America in whole. For example, he gave no credence to lower land and labor costs then prevailing in America and assumed the French answered his questions with the candor equal to his own. He did not consider that those who advised him had little or no information about America's markets, agriculture, or economics, nor did he seem to realize that those advisors, burdened with competition from cane sugar, saw little need to give encouragement to prospective competitors. Unlike David Lee Child who had visited the European factories three years earlier when conditions were more favorable to French sugar manufacturers and returned home in a state of great enthusiasm, Barry returned from his visit disheartened.

Perhaps Barry was unaware that hundreds of sugarbeet factories had sprung up like wildfire across Europe in the quarter century preceding his visit with locations in every European country except Norway. Similarly, he seemed unaware that in each of the countries hosting factories to process the new crop, the climate, terrain, soil conditions, and cultural appetites of the people were remarkably similar to features found in Michigan. Barry solemnly entered into his notebook as gospel, viewpoints that would doom the new Michigan industry at birth. His report, conveying the advice of his French counselors that sugarbeets were unworthy of the time and investment of Michigan farmers, was devastating.

Although there was an outcry in opposition to John Barry's opinion during which many suggested that productivity in America was greater than in France and that Barry had been duped, investors and farmers lost heart and set aside their dreams. An economic depression (described as a "panic" in the public media of the day) beginning in 1837 increased investor caution and shriveled the nation's money supply. The least cloud of doubt chased money away from new ideas. The future governor met accusations that the Europeans hoodwinked him by showing compassion for his detractors. In reply, he wrote, "It is possible, though not probable, that I might have been imposed upon and deceived by those engaged in the business of making sugar, of whom my inquiries were made, and from whom my information was obtained. I think, however, that such was not the fact, as the information obtained at one establishment was always in the main, of a character similar to that obtained at another."

An earlier decision by the owners of White Pigeon Sugar Manufactory to employ outdated French machinery reinforced support for Barry's opinion that sugarbeet factories in America would fare badly in any effort to compete with cane sugar. The absence of trained technicians added considerably to the factory's poor performance, with the result that it tended to produce a large amount of molasses but little crystallized sugar. Molasses is a byproduct of beet sugar manufacturing. A processed sugarbeet results in some sugar, some pulp (The remains of the sugar beet after the sugar has been separated.), and some molasses. The molasses represents all the impurities present in the beet when it arrived at the factory's door plus actual sugar that escaped during the process only to end up in the molasses tanks. Even a well managed factory will experience high ratio of sugar lost to the molasses stream resulting in a sugar content of 50% in the molasses. A poorly managed factory will allow much more sugar to enter the molasses stream, thus causing the molasses to have a high purity. Its brackish nature caused by the presence of salts makes it unfit for the human palette but ideal for cattle. The molasses found in the kitchen cupboard is blackstrap molasses, produced as a byproduct of cane sugar.

John Barry noted that the molasses was not "tolerable to the taste”, an observation that betrayed his lack of understanding of the beet sugar production process. Had he asked, his French advisors would have revealed that molasses had an outlet as livestock feed.

One year after the Michigan legislature approved the sugar bounty, Samuel Chapin, who in addition to serving as an officer of White Pigeon Sugar Manufactory also served as a legislative representative from St. Joseph County, sponsored a bill to loan five thousand dollars to the struggling company. The measure was referred to a select committee of which Chapin was named chairman. The committee reminded the legislature Michigan was committed to ventures in economic development, including agricultural experimentation, and that the White Pigeon effort would establish, once and for all, the practicability or impracticability of sugarbeets in Michigan. The proposal passed both houses but conditions were attached that would make it highly unlikely the loan would ever become reality. The first of the conditions was that the company secure a mortgage in an amount equal to twice the value of the loan. Second, the appropriation would occur only if in the opinion of the State Superintendent of Public Instruction it would not lessen sums distributed among the state's school districts. The probability of the state granting the loan, especially during a period when Michigan was still in the grip of the 1837 financial panic, was on the far side of remote. Despite failure to receive state assistance, the White Pigeon company, having started at exactly the wrong time, with outdated equipment, a lack of technical knowledge, and too little capital, held on for two years.

When the doors closed forever in June 1841, concluding an experiment that met a fate made even more ignominious by the fact of the White Pigeon Sugar Manufactory became a lost chapter in the state's history. It would not again come to the public's attention until 1939 when the Detroit Free Press made passing mention of White Pigeon in its “A Hundred Years Ago” column, where it was observed that the company had opened its doors a century before. A sugar executive of the day, astounded by the account, immediately wrote the Free Press, suggesting an error and that to his certain knowledge no sugar company existed in Michigan until 1898.

Sugarbeets would have their day but that would come only after all those who had struggled to make the industry a reality had passed from the scene.

By 1841, when Michigan farmers were casting about for anything that could serve as a cash crop (including a short-lived scheme to process cornstalks for sugar production), another crop emerged that would hold the attention of investors for nearly three-quarters of a century. The crop was timber and for the next fifty-nine years pushed all thoughts of beet sugar from the minds of investors. It wasn't until lumber petered out toward the end of the century that Michigan once again expressed an interest in sugarbeets, an interest that would result in the formation of a credible industry that continues to thrive more than a century later. The Michigan Legislature, acutely aware of the need of industry to replace lumber, in 1897 passed Act Number 48 which provided a bounty of one cent for each pound of sugar produced in Michigan from sugarbeets. Although the bounty would have a short life after failing to overcome legal hurdles, it succeeded in sparking the founding of an industry that still serves the people of Michigan.

SOURCES:

Christenson, Donald R. Crop and Soil Sciences Department, Michigan State University STATUS AND POTENTIAL OF MICHIGAN AGRICULTURE SUGARBEETS, Michigan State University Extension, Ag Experiment Station Special Reports - SR529201 07/28/98

CPI Inflation calculator for adjusting factors appearing in Donald Christenson's foregoing study in which he wrote: "In 1987, the net direct contribution of sugarbeet production and processing to the Michigan economy amounted to $157 million in expenditures and income. Adding the
indirect effects, the total contribution to business activity was $434 million (Ferris, 1990)." The amount of $157 was inflation adjusted to $298 million by the author; the amount of $434 was inflation adjusted to $825 million by the author. Adjustments did not include improvements to income resulting from higher farm yields and greater factory efficiency (Specifically at the Bay City operation where molasses desugarization operations increased revenues.) or the closing of a small beet sugar factory in 2005.

GUTTLEBEN, Daniel, The Sugar Tramp – 1954 printed by Bay Cities Duplicating Company, San Francisco, California

Historical Collections-Collections and Research made by the Michigan Pioneer and Historical Society, page 533, Vol XXVII, Lansing, 1897

McGINNIS, R.A. (Ed.) 1982, Beet Sugar Technology, Fort Collins, Colorado , Beet Sugar Development Foundation

MICHIGAN, Documents accompanying the Journal of the House of Representatives of the State of Michigan at the annual session in 1838, p. 573

WESTERN FARMER, Volume I, Number 1, first issue, Published January 19, 1841, Detroit, Michigan featuring correspondence by future governor John S. Barry concerning his visits with European sugar manufacturers

Copyright, 2009, All Rights Reserved

About the Author: Thomas Mahar served as Executive Vice President of Monitor Sugar Company between 1984 and 1999 and as President of Gala Food Processing, a sugar packaging company, from 1993-1998. He retired in 1999 and now devotes his free time to writing about the history of the sugar industry. He authored, Sweet Energy, The Story of Monitor Sugar Company in 2001, and Michigan's Beet Sugar History (Newsbeet, Fall, 2006).