American Crystal Sugar Company

The American Beet Sugar Company, predecessor of the American Crystal Sugar Company, was incorporated on March 24, 1899. The new company consolidated under one management four beet sugar companies that had been established by Henry Oxnard during the preceding decade. Oxnard's interest in the sugar industry had been influenced by his father, Thomas, an entrepreneur who had successfully operated cane sugar refineries in Louisiana, Boston, and Brooklyn. In 1887 Henry had traveled to Europe to learn about the beet sugar industry on that continent, where the process had originated in the early nineteenth century and was much more extensively developed than in the United States.

Oxnard came back from Europe eager to try his hand at beet sugar processing. Attracted to Nebraska by a state bounty of one cent per pound of sugar produced, he established the Oxnard Beet Sugar Company at Grand Island in 1890. The next year he built the Norfolk Beet Sugar Company in Norfolk, Nebraska, and the Chino Valley Beet Sugar Company in Chino, California, where the growing season was longer than in Nebraska. In 1894 Oxnard organized the Oxnard Construction Company, which built an addition to the Chino factory in the same year and which in 1897 constructed the plant for Oxnard's fourth enterprise, the Pacific Beet Sugar Company, in Oxnard, California.

...