Garland, Utah: The Sugar Town

The town now called Garland started out as Sunset in eighteen ninety, a farming settlement in the Bear River Valley. It got a new name and a new purpose in nineteen oh three, when the Utah Sugar Company built a beet-sugar factory here. The company named the town after William Garland, the contractor who built the factory.

It was a true company town. The Utah Sugar Company donated land for an LDS chapel and amusement hall, built fourteen homes, a hotel, a general store, a bank, a post office, and a newspaper called The Garland Globe. The sugar plant ran for decades and anchored the local economy. The LDS Church's involvement in Utah beet sugar was significant enough to attract federal scrutiny of the sugar industry. Today Garland is a city of about twenty-six hundred in the Bear River Valley, the sugar factory long gone, the name of a contractor the only monument left to that first industrial chapter.