Milestones Icon: Great Western Sugar Co.

The 200-foot-high sugar mill at 11939 Sugarmill Road in Longmont is a daily reminder of the importance of sugar beets on the Front Range in the 1900s.

Denver businessman Charles Boettcher founded the Great Western Sugar Co. with some partners around the turn of the century. The group of entrepreneurs built the first sugar mill in northeastern Colorado in Loveland in 1901. As the company expanded, the Longmont sugar mill was built in 1903.

Numerous farmers grew sugar beets in northeastern Colorado – historic photos show Longmont farmers loading the beets onto trucks with pitchforks.

As Great Western expanded rapidly, it built or acquired several other mills and facilities in other parts of Colorado as well as in Nebraska, Wyoming and Nebraska.

Colorado businessman Bill White bought Great Western in 1967. By 1974, however, White decided to sell a controlling interest to the Hunt Brothers organization, the Texas oilmen. The sugar beet industry fell into economic decline for the next decade as other sugar crops grew in prominence in other parts of the country.

In 1985, Great Western’s Longmont mill, along with its five other sugar processing plants and five storage facilities in a four-state area was purchased by British firm Tate & Lyle, which changed the company name to Western Sugar Co.

Tate & Lyle continued to struggle economically in response to the volatile sugar market in the United States. In the late 1990s, the British firm put Western Sugar up for sale.

In response, more than 1,000 sugar beet growers in Colorado, Nebraska, Wyoming and Montana came together to form the Western Sugar Cooperative in December 2001. The cooperative bought Western Sugar Co. in April 2002, including the operations and storage facilities.

The cooperative entered a long-term lease agreement that year with American Crystal Sugar Co. to operate out of a Torrington, Wyoming, processing plant. The Longmont sugar mill storage facilities are still used, along with storage silos in Greeley, Rocky Ford and Sterling, Colorado; and in Gering and Mitchell, Nebraska. The company’s headquarters are in Denver.

In recent years, the iconic, white mill also has been discussed as the potential home of an end-of-line RTD commuter rail station surrounded by a new neighborhood with loftstyle homes, a grocery store and offices.

City officials in 2009 warned vandals and transients to stay away from the largely unused site, which is contaminated with asbestos.

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