The small town of Ovid rests in the far northeast corner of Colorado near the Nebraska border. The town retains a significant historical landmark: the gleaming white storage silos containing beet sugar from what once was the Great Western Sugar Company’s finest factory.
Colorado’s once booming sugar economy died off with the expiration of the Sugar Act in 1974. Ovid’s GW factory was closed in 1976, and by September of 2006 the entire domestic beet sugar industry had become grower-owned. Amalgamated Sugar, a cooperative of sugar beet farmers, bought the Ovid property in 2002, not anticipating the liability they were taking on.