Ovid: The Sugar Company's Town

Ovid, Colorado is a company town that outlived the company. The site is said to have begun as a Union Pacific water stop called Morgan in the late eighteen hundreds, a bare-bones railroad service point in the far northeastern corner of Colorado's Sedgwick County. In nineteen twenty-four, everything changed when the Great Western Sugar Company built a sugar beet processing factory here and effectively built the town around it. The town incorporated under the name Ovid in nineteen twenty-five.

The Jumbo Reservoir had made large-scale beet farming viable in this corner of the state by providing a reliable water supply. At its height, Ovid's sugar factory processed the harvests coming off thousands of acres of irrigated Sedgwick County cropland. The plant operated for six decades before closing in nineteen eighty-five. The town remains, small and agricultural, sitting near the Nebraska line where sugar beet fields still stretch toward the horizon.