East Tawas, Michigan – Where the fools rushed

In the early 20th century, Michigan, a state that had linked its economic fortunes to the lumber industry, began to come to terms with the reality that it had sold its inheritance for pennies on the dollar. The wood that had been their economic pillar was gone! For sixty years, loggers had ranged across the state from Lake Michigan on the state’s western shoreline to Lake Huron on the eastern shoreline and from Lake Erie in the south to Lake Superior at its northern tip, clearing the forests and Leaving behind the economic depression, an ugly environment. and hopelessness

Gradually, the leaders of the state became aware of a new industry, one that did not destroy resources but added resources: agriculture, especially agricultural products that included processing factories. The developing sugar beet industry fits the bill. The Michigan Sugar Company’s new factory in Essexville, a suburb of Bay City, proved beyond doubt that farmers, industrialists, and venture capitalists alike could benefit from growing sugar beets and then processing them into table sugar. Soon the rush to build beet sugar factories turned into a full-scale stampede. Michigan’s sugar beet industry intensified at a breakneck pace.

Nine factories followed the successful Essexville experiment. A cyclone of enthusiasm sparked a mad scramble as investors, builders, bankers and farmers combined energy and skills to bring eight factories to life in a single year. That was in 1899 when new factories were built in Holland, Kalamazoo, Rochester, Benton Harbor, Alma, West Bay City, Caro, and a second factory in Essexville. In Marine City, investors, inspired by the success in Essexville, paid Kilby Manufacturing $557,000 to build Michigan’s tenth sugar beet mill. Despite a shortage of factory builders and of engineers to operate them, fourteen more factories sprang up on the outskirts of Michigan cities over the next six years, the last of which appeared in Charlevoix in 1906. Fifteen years later, Monitor Sugar Company built all twenty factories in the state. -fourth and last beet factory.

Unfortunately, the unbridled enthusiasm for new beet sugar factories often resulted in factories being built in places that had not won the hearts of farmers. One such place was East Tawas, a charming town on the shores of Lake Huron that would one day attract tourists seeking the sandy beaches and gentle waves of Lake Huron. But until 1903, East Tawas, like most of Michigan, relied on the lumber industry for its daily food. As the lumber barons packed up their moneybags and set out for greener pastures, investors turned to the beet sugar industry that was burning as hot as the dot-com industry would be burning nearly a century later. Instead of fame and fortune, however, East Tawas earned the distinction of having a sugar factory in its vicinity that would have the shortest useful life of any beet sugar factory in Michigan.

The total operating time for its two-year useful life was twenty-nine days, eighteen the first year and eleven during the second and final year. The total weight of beets cut during that period was 17,648 tons, far from enough to support the mill’s overhead, let alone generate profit for investors. Some called it Churchill’s Folly after Worthy Churchill, the president of the Bay City-Michigan Sugar Company.

With construction of the Bay City Sugar factory in Essexville underway, Worthy Churchill wanted to secure a sugar beet farm somewhere north of Bay City, where cheap, idle lumber was waiting for someone to put it to a better purpose. Coincidentally, East Tawas was burdened by a bankrupt sawmill located at a fork in the road a few miles north of town, where, today, US 23 intersects Tawas Beach Road. Its proximity to Lake Huron offered a handy source of water. Rail lines built to transport lumber from the sawmills would now carry sugar equipment to the site. The residents of East Tawas, like residents of villages across the state, hated to leave even though their gently rolling hills, once covered with magnificent white pines, were now barren. Rich soils derived from unprotected hills to settle in mossy swamps. Short, crooked pines and weeds grew in dry crevices near the edges of the marshes.

East Tawas residents were clamoring for a sugar beet factory. The fledgling industry was three years old, but already legends involving sudden wealth and entire communities saved from extinction, caused a clamor for one in their community. Significantly, others who had made substantial investments in the new industry did not heed the call. Those absent included the most successful of the pioneer sugar manufacturers: Ben Boutell, the Penoyar brothers William and Wedworth, Nathan Bradley, Rasmus Hansen, Thomas Cranage, and every other major investor in the Michigan sugar industry at the time. That left Worthy Churchill, who showed support for him with a $50,000 investment, and Charles B. Warren, a Sugar Trust representative, tossed $25,000 into the pot. Warren’s Detroit partner and good friend, Charles Bewick, a Detroit industrialist signed for $50,000 and accepted a vice presidency while Warren added the title of treasurer to his growing list of responsibilities. Eugene Fifield of Bay City, who had earned a reputation among investors as someone who worked well with farmers, added his name to the shareholder list and $1,000 to the treasury. Citizens of more modest means took note of the large commitments of men of power and dipped into their meager savings to do the same.

Churchill, eager to get the wheels moving and very pleased with Joseph Kilby’s performance in building the Bay City Sugar Company’s Essexville works, set out to complement him for the East Tawas project. Joseph Kilby submitted an offer of $598,500. Based on every thousand tons of beet cutting capacity, the price was almost fifty percent higher than the cost of the Essexville mill, indicating a shift from the small, quick-build mill to larger facilities consisting of engineering and quality equipment. However, Vice President Charles Bewick said for him to wait, not so fast. He also had a candidate for the construction contract. Bewick had gained some experience at Caro and Croswell, where new factories had been built. He was then serving as the first president of the Sanilac Sugar Refining Company, which owned the Croswell factory, and had a long history in Detroit’s manufacturing sector. He included among his friends Joseph Berry, a noted varnish manufacturer who owned with his brother Thomas an eight thousand acre farm near the middle of Michigan Thumb. The Berry brothers became major shareholders in Bewick’s Croswell factory along with DM Ferry, the world’s largest distributor of garden seeds, all packed in Ferry’s sprawling Detroit factory.

In Bewick’s view, the Oxnard Construction Company offered experience, quality, and an unbroken record of success. Joseph Kilby, on the other hand, was an upstart, a former member of EH Dyer who had left on his account. Bewick protested Churchill’s premature announcement and pushed for his election. Churchill responded and prevailed with an objection to Oxnard’s practice of submitting cost plus contracts. He wanted a firm offer and got it from Kilby, whose offer matched dollar-for-dollar the offer from the Churchill’s Bay City mill built three years earlier at a cost of $1,000 per ton for beet-cutting capacity. The contract went to Kilby, who in turn assigned the job to John Shepherd, a prominent construction engineer who oversaw the construction of factories in Benton Harbor, Holland, and Carrollton.

In the short term, the selection of a builder made little difference. Tawas was the wrong place to grow beets. Lake Huron lay to the east of the mill site, and although it served well as a water source, beets could not easily take root in its waves. The nearby slopes, stripped of trees, would have been a difficult place to grow and care for beets, but even that impractical source of beetroot soil had already given up its soil to newly formed bogs. Where the ground was level, stumps interfered with farming. However, there was some arable land, but the farmers who owned it lacked experience with sugar beets. Those who succumbed to the persuasive pleas of Gus Carton, the mill’s agronomist and top farmer recruiter, lost money when they couldn’t grow enough beets per acre to turn a profit.

Kilby’s field staff under the direction of Jack Shepard performed better than any factory built at the time in Michigan. Known and respected for his attention to detail, which included extensive water testing—running the factory on just water to locate weak spots—Shepard built a factory that exceeded expectations. The factory cut 594 tons of beets per day during its inaugural cycle, a clear record, and only six tons below its planned capacity. Unfortunately for Shepard and his crew, there were only 10,690 tons of beets available, enough for just eighteen days of operation.

The following year, the frost was delayed and kept the farmers indoors. A late start, combined with a profitless harvest the previous year and rumors that the factory would close, caused farmers to return to traditional crops. The factory purchased only 6,958 tons of beets, enough for just eleven days of cutting. Gus Carton proved to be indomitable. He proposed a plan whereby the company would buy land and resell it to Russian immigrants at attractive prices. He lured the Russians and invested $25,000, but did not get the beets, the Russians demonstrating no less independence than the farmers already present.

Lightning struck the brick chimney in July 1905. The directors, all seasoned investors, knew better than to add more capital. The chimney was where it fell and arrangements were made to ship the beet crop to a Bay City beet mill. The disaster had also occurred in St. Louis Park, Minnesota, where a beet factory burned to the ground. The East Tawas board of directors saw the fire as an opportunity. When beets destined for the St. Louis Park mill went to another mill, interest was raised about their quality, especially the beets from Chaska, Minnesota. Under the direction of the board of directors, Kilby dismantled the East Tawas factory and reinstalled it in Chaska, where it remained in operation for the next sixty-five years.

Slowly rebounding from the loss of the logging industry and its failed sugar mill, East Tawas is today a successful destination point for tourists enjoying the nearby Huron National Forest, Lake Huron and Tawas Bay, and the popularized AuSable River. by canoeists and fishermen and the Tawas Point Lighthouse, in operation since 1876, as well as Tawas Point State Park. It does not plan to encourage the construction of another sugar factory any time soon.