Spreckels and the Company Town

About five miles south of Salinas, just off the main highway, there is a small community called Spreckels that still has the slightly formal, well-maintained quality of a place that was planned by a corporation and built with corporate money. The houses are wood-frame, the proportions restrained. An architect named W.H. Weeks, who also designed the sugar factory, drew the original plans. The factory was by far the largest building in the valley when it was completed.

Claus Spreckels was born in Germany in eighteen twenty-eight and came to the United States as a young man, eventually building a sugar refining empire that first made him one of the wealthiest men in California on the basis of Hawaiian cane sugar, then expanded into domestic beet sugar when cane became too contested. The Salinas Valley, with its deep alluvial soil and mild maritime climate, was suited to sugar beet cultivation, and Spreckels bought land aggressively throughout the valley in the eighteen nineties.

The Spreckels Sugar Company was incorporated in San Francisco in August of eighteen ninety-six. The factory outside Salinas opened in February of eighteen ninety-nine and was immediately, by the company's own accounting, the largest sugar beet factory in the world. The company built a private narrow-gauge railroad to move beets from the growing areas to the factory and then to the docks at Moss Landing, bypassing the standard railroads entirely.

The town of Spreckels grew up around the factory. It was a company town in the sense that the company built it, but with some unusual features: workers were not required to live there, and the businesses were independently owned rather than company stores. Houses were sold to private buyers beginning in nineteen twenty-five, when the community began to detach from its corporate origins.

The factory closed in nineteen eighty-two after more than eighty years of operation, by which point the Salinas Valley had long since pivoted from sugar beets to vegetables. The town survived the closure and is today considered one of the best-preserved former company towns in California. Sugar beets had been the valley's first industrialized crop, the first demonstration that this climate and this soil could produce agricultural commodities at continental scale. Everything that came after, the lettuce, the broccoli, the labor conflicts, the farmworker movements, followed the infrastructure and the model that Spreckels established.

Steinbeck worked in the Spreckels Sugar factory as a young man, loading sugar beets to earn money between Stanford semesters. He would later draw on that experience, on the bunkhouses and the routine, when he wrote Of Mice and Men. The bunkhouses where Lennie and George lived are not quite the Spreckels bunkhouses, but they are close cousins.