This article covered the end of the very first sugar beat season for the new Los Alamitos Sugar Factory. The Los Alamitos Bee was the town’s very first newspaper and was in operation as early as mid-July, when the factory was nearing the completion of construction.
Los Alamitos, California.
On Monday of last week, or October 25, at 9 o’clock and 12 minutes, the run of beets for this season was finished up, and immediately the big steam whistles made the bright morning hideous with their unearthly screechings.
Just a week later the brown sugar was all refined and to-day the syrup was all finished up; thus the first season’s run of Orange county’s sugar factory closed, and it has been a very successful season too.
Since the factory started, five months ago, 30,025 tons of beets have been delivered; this crop was harvested from 2887 acres of land, most of it being new ground.
Now just to give the uninitiated some idea of the enormous quantities of beets used in making this season’s output of sugar we will do a little illustrating. The fields that the beets were raised on, if placed in one body of land, would make a field one mile wide and four miles long, or half a mile wide and eight miles long. The 30,025 tons of beets were delivered in 1000 loads, each load averaged three tons; we find that the general run of teams engaged in hauling were 4-horse teams; allowing 36 feet to a team we have a wagon train six and nine-elevenths miles in length, with 4000 head of horses and 1000 drivers. Taking $3.65 as an average price per ton, we find the contents of our wagon train worth the neat little sum of $109,591.25.
From these 30,025 tons of beets we have the following amount of refined sugar, approximately, 8,740,000 pounds, as the output for 1897, which, for the sake of a little figuring, will bring the manufacturer 5)£ cents per pound, or $476,200 as the value of the sugar just turned out.
To carry this immense amount of California sweetness would require a train of 292 cars, which, if strung out in one continuous line, would cover two miles of track. One hundred and ninety-eight cars of sugar has been shipped from this factory up to the present time.
The Los Alamitos factory has the distinction of being the only sugar factory in the world that ever made expenses on the first month’s run, due in most part to the superior article manufactured, with a rapidly increasing demand for the same from the very first run of sugar. Another point for the Los Alamitos sugar is that it is the only beet sugar that can be used with any success in the manufacture of high grade candies.—Bee, November 6.