Torrington: Where the Oregon Trail Became a Sugar Beet Field

Torrington sits on the North Platte River in southeastern Wyoming, twenty-three miles east of Fort Laramie, on ground that emigrants wore deep ruts into during the eighteen forties and eighteen fifties. The Oregon Trail, the Mormon Trail, and the Pony Express route all passed through or near here. The town itself was founded in eighteen eighty-nine by William Curtis, who named it after his hometown in Connecticut.

By the nineteen twenties, veterans who had drawn homesteads along the government irrigation canal on the south side of the river began planting sugar beets, and the Holly Sugar Company opened a processing factory in nineteen twenty-six that ran for roughly nine decades before closing in twenty nineteen. Today Goshen County produces more cattle per year than any other Wyoming county, making Torrington a working agricultural hub built on top of what was once the most heavily traveled road in North American history.