Days Gone By

Photo: March 2, 2011, 7:52 AM.
It was another beautiful winter morning in Cache Valley - fog in the low lying areas and clear skies above.  From the benches looking down it was like looking into a misty white lake.
My travels today took me past the old factory smoke stack in Richmond.  The first time I was in a hurry to destinate. The second time I was free to take in the sights, so to speak.  The sun was up, fog in that area had lifted, and a photo opportunity presented itself:

This photo put my mind to work, thinking about sugar. And beets. And family.
My father-in-law grew up raising sugar beets and other crops with his dad and his siblings on a farm in Box Elder County.  He has shared many memories about the Garland Sugar Factory, whose tall concrete stack still stands as a landmark, just like this smoke stack in Richmond does.
I have an uncle who worked for the Lewiston, UT factory of the Amalgamated Sugar Company until that location closed down.  He followed a job with Amalgamated Sugar to Idaho, taking his branch of the family tree and planting it in a new place.
This walk down memory lane caused me to research the history of sugar production in Northern Utah.  I found two great articles on Wikipedia about the comings and goings of the Amalgamated Sugar Company and the Utah-Idaho Sugar Company whose production facilities dotted the landscape of Northern Utah and points elsewhere.
What I didn’t locate was a reference in any online history of the two companies above, and smaller companies not mentioned, as to the owners/operators of the factory in Richmond.  How could this be? I decided to take my search elsewhere and the answer surprised me a bit.
As it turns out, the smoke stack in Richmond was not part of a sugar processing plant. It was the old Utah Condensed Milk Company. I have lived in Cache Valley all of my life, and yet I missed that detail? Certainly I had to have heard this somewhere before, how could I have misplaced that knowledge?
Don’t worry, I’ll get over it. After all, I was able to spend some time thinking about the history of my family and how it relates to the history of this area, and now I know how to research the days gone by of this valley landmark.