Sugar Beets, Uranium, and Ampitheaters

The Story of Grand Junction's Warehouse

In Grand Junction, Colorado, off of Riverside Parkway and South 12th Street just to the north of Las Colonias Park, sits an unassuming brick warehouse often overlooked by most commuters. Many residents don’t realize that this aging structure has persisted through some of Colorado’s most turbulent periods. Through the decades, the people within its walls aided Colorado in some of its most notable feats. Despite its simplicity, this building was instrumental in rescuing Colorado’s economy at its most dire and in winning a World War and the Cold War.

The White Gold Rush

At the end of the 19th century, Colorado’s mining boom was coming to an end, and the resulting panic left 18% of the population unemployed. As small businesses and large companies alike began to fold up, a new source of revenue would be required to rescue Colorado’s economy. Swedish farmer Peter Magnes immigrated to the United States in the early 1850s. When the Pike’s Peak gold rush arrived in 1859, Magnes became attracted by the reports of prosperity and triumph. He and his wife purchased 160 acres south of fledgling Denver and began farming the property. Unfortunately, Denver was hit by a catastrophic flood in 1864, completely destroying his crop, but the doughty farmer eagerly started anew. In 1865, Magnes ordered some special seeds from France. These seeds were for beta vulgaris, or sugar beets: a white taproot with a high concentration of sucrose, excellent for the production of commercial sugar, often nicknamed “white gold.” Magnes would unwittingly launch a white gold rush in what would become one of Colorado’s biggest economic booms by the next century.

The Grand Valley was an ideal agricultural region. Sugar beets could withstand the same low rainfall, temperature variation, and high alkalinity that sometimes made it difficult to plant orchards. In 1887, prominent Grand Junction citizens Henry R. Rhone and M. L. Allison became the first to experiment with growing sugar beets in the Grand Valley. The quality of these early seeds were tested at the Assay Office in the Denver Mint, the same facility that assessed the value of precious metal samples. Within the next decade, sugar beets would occupy more than one-thousand acres of Grand Valley farmland. This increase in demand for sugar was largely driven by United States foreign policy. During the 1890s, the Cuban War of Independence led to increased tensions between the United States and Spain. Cuban sugar cane imports were completely cut off when the Spanish-American War broke out in 1898. Quickly, statewide calls for in-state sugar production gained traction. Local businessman Charles N. Cox began lobbying for a sugar beet factory in Grand Junction, but he would need investors. One of these would be Charles Boettcher, a German immigrant who had seen the success of the sugar beet industry in Europe first-hand, and who would go on to establish Colorado’s celebrated Great Western Sugar Company in the South Platte River Valley. With enough investors, Cox successfully founded the Colorado Sugar Manufacturing Company in January 1899, but the company would not assure Grand Junction the contract. Instead, they allowed Colorado towns to compete for the new plant. Much to the chagrin of many Front Range and San Luis Valley settlers, Mesa County won the contest after guaranteeing that they would finance at least one-percent of the plant’s construction, donating 1,500 acres for the factory site, and securing pledges from local farmers to grow beets on 3,000 acres, the minimum needed for a plant.

E. H. Dyer designed a colossal brick factory capable of processing between 350 and 550 tons of beets per day. The building was three stories tall and its foundation was larger than a football field. The brick walls were secured with star bolts spanning the width of the building in a style that was popular at the time. More than one million bricks and thirty railcars of steel were used in construction. By December 1899, Colorado’s first sugar beet plant was completed. Unfortunately, the plant ran into a lot of problems. Few American farmers understood how difficult raising sugar beets was when they signed their contracts. Farmers were simply unable to produce enough beets to support the plant. The company went into receivership in 1901, again in 1902, and kept exchanging hands until it was finally sold to Holly Sugar in 1916.

The solution to their farming needs was found in immigration. In the 1870s, persecuted but prosperous Russian-Germans began emigrating Russia for the United States. These farmers were experienced in the cultivation of sugar beets. Immigrant railcars were prepared to ship German immigrants from the East Coast at low cost or no charge. Two hundred German families came to the Grand Valley, and two hundred more arrived in the Uncompahgre Valley surrounding Montrose, but while they initially brought their willingness and experience with them, these immigrants soon established their own farms and began cultivating less difficult crops. The replacement labor would come from Hispanic migrants who were willing to do difficult work at low cost.

The sugar companies realized that they could keep these migrant workers by providing them with permanent housing. In 1921, the Holly Sugar Company constructed two row houses north of the Grand (now called the Colorado) River in Grand Junction, totaling twenty-two units. These Hispanic colonies were sometimes called “Petersburgs” (after Peter Magnes) or by their Spanish name colonias. Eventually, the Hispanic workers would earn enough money to leave the row houses and construct homes of their own. The row houses were demolished after they outlived their usefulness, but the name “La Colonia” stuck. In 1998, when the city of Grand Junction started planning a park on the site, it held a contest allowing the winner to name the park. José Chavez won the contest and named it Las Colonias in honor of the workers who lived there.

By 1929, most local sugar beet cultivation had been localized to Delta and Montrose Counties to the south of Mesa County, and the Great Depression made it unprofitable to ship the beets by rail to Grand Junction. Holly Sugar shut down its Grand Junction plant in favor of a newer factory in Delta, although it would continue to run it intermittently until 1933. By the ‘50s and ‘60s, people preferred imported cane sugar to homegrown white gold, and sugar beet production represents a small portion of the United States’ economy today, but even as the old Grand Junction plant had reached its apparent retirement, this would not be the end of its story.

Uranium and the Atomic Bomb

On March 23, 1943, as the Second World War was in full swing, Second Lieutenant Philip Leahy arrived in Grand Junction. Under the orders of General Leslie Groves, Leahy placed the city at the center of the Manhattan Project’s uranium and “strategic minerals” procurement from the Uravan Mineral Belt and other domestic reserves. Leahy established two offices under the pretext of the Colorado Area Engineers Office. His front office was on the northeast corner of Third and Main Street. For his uranium refinery, Leahy purchased a fifty-five acre gravel pit adjacent to the Gunnison River for its proximity to the railroad and its relative seclusion. His headquarters, established as the “Manhattan Engineer District Grand Junction Office" and the “Atomic Energy Commission Grand Junction Operations Office,” occupied an old log cabin that served as the gravel pit’s offices. Without any way to process uranium on his own, Leahy signed a top-secret contract with the United States Vanadium Corporation in Uravan. While the Vanadium Corporation would keep vanadium for steel production, the uranium found in the tailings would be processed into a green sludge and be transported from its processing plants in Uravan and Durango to Leahy’s new refinery in Grand Junction. To accommodate the increased production, the Manhattan Engineer District agreed to build another mill for the Vanadium Corporation.

From there, they could search for more uranium deposits outside the Uravan Mineral Belt. In a partnership with the Vanadium Corporations parent company, the Union Carbide and Carbon Corporation, the Manhattan Project created the Union Mines Development Corporation as a front for the discovery radioactive materials. The company would search for related minerals that often accompany uranium ore, such as vanadium, tungsten, and molybdenum. This company established a field office in Grand Junction until the Atomic Energy Commission took over in 1946.

For four years, Grand Junction’s refinery was the United States’ only source of domestic uranium, providing more than 14% of all uranium concentrate used in the Manhattan Project. But perhaps Grand Junction’s greatest achievement was its successful recycling of toxic waste. The green sludge produced at the mills, often called “yellowcake” due to its cake batter consistency, contained a high concentration of vanadium, which is used to strengthen steel. Leahy’s Grand Junction Office achieved 87 percent efficiency in recycling that leftover sludge into vanadium. In 1947, the Atomic Energy Commission organized the Colorado Raw Materials Office that spearheaded uranium research and the development of more mills and processing techniques during the Cold War. In 1947, the Atomic Energy Commission offered to purchase any uranium brought to their office, and provided a $10,000 reward for finding a large deposit, to support its nuclear armistice production during the Cold War. By April 1948, the purchase price for uranium from the Colorado Plateau had risen to twenty dollars per ton. This sparked a uranium boom allowing anyone, from residents to business magnates, to become part of the bonanza.

Contaminated Cleanup

In 1950, the Grand Junction’s old Holly Sugar Factory was purchased by the Climax Uranium Company, which gutted the building of its sugar beet machinery and converted its interior into a uranium mill. Colorado’s white gold was officially being replaced by yellowcake. The plant began production in 1951, running twenty-four hours a day for the next nineteen years, but here they made a critical mistake. More than two million tons of tailings were produced during the Climax Uranium Mill’s lifetime, and most of this was driven by truck dumped on the banks of the Colorado River near the present-day site of Las Colonias Park. The mill began running out of places to dispose of this waste, so it made its tailings available to Grand Junction and its citizens as building material. The city used the tailings to build sidewalks, sewers, roads, parks, and other infrastructure, private contractors purchased the tailings for use in mortar and concrete production, and citizens used it as a filler in homes. Approximately 300,000 tons of tailings were donated to the city of Grand Junction. It wasn’t until 1966 that concerns were raised about the safety of using uranium tailings in construction, and it was quickly realized that thousands of buildings were at risk of contamination across the nation, with the possibility of cancer-causing radium and radon gas. As the risks of uranium were realized, the government stopped buying ore in the ‘60s, and yellowcake in the ‘70s. In 1970, the Grand Junction Office was tasked with cleaning up the “radioactive waste strewn in the wake of four decades’ worth of nearly unregulated industries of uranium mining, milling, and weapons production.” Almost seven thousand properties were at risk of elevated radiation and radon gas. Around five thousand properties were found to be unsafe, over four thousand of which were remediated in Grand Junction. Some buildings could be treated simply by replacing contaminated soil with nonhazardous soil, while others would have to be completely leveled. The first and most obvious candidate for demolition was the Climax Uranium Mill itself, and the Climax Uranium Company disposed of eight of its twelve main buildings between 1970 and 1971. The other four would be evaluated for safety. In 1972, the Department of Energy received congressional approval for its planned Grand Junction Remedial Action Program, launching the long process of cleaning up America. The Grand Junction Office would be designated as a Center of Excellence for its success.

In 1988, the Department of Energy began examining its own Grand Junction Office for possible contamination during its days as Leahy’s refinery. It was discovered that nearly thirty percent of the complex’s sixty-one acres were polluted, but as cleanup efforts went underway, it was ascertained that more than three times the soil was contaminated than originally thought, totaling around 300,000 cubic yards of radioactive material, and this waste was leaching into the Gunnison River. Between 1994 and 2001, most of this material was removed and many of the original plant buildings demolished, and the land was finally sold. Unfortunately, most of Grand Junction’s groundwater is still considered unsafe, and the city has decided not to clean up the groundwater for use as drinking water.

The sheer amount of contaminated soil necessitated the creation of disposal sites away from population centers. The Uranium Mill Tailings Remedial Action created nineteen disposal cells to remove the tailings from twenty-two inactive mills. These cells are primarily located on Colorado’s Western Slope. The Grand Junction Disposal Site (formerly the Cheney Disposal Cell) eighteen miles south of the city is the only cell that remains uncapped. Currently, the site holds 4.5 million tons of contaminated waste. It was supposed to close in 2023, which would have proved disastrous to Grand Junction’s cleanup and removal efforts, but the cell still had room for an additional 223,000 cubic yards of waste, so the site was authorized to remain open for another decade. Still, toxic waste cleanup remains a pervasive issue in the West, and as more property owners test for radiation, the number of contaminated sites is on the rise. It’s difficult for the city to arrange small cleanups for dozens of properties, so this responsibility often falls to the landowners and contractors themselves. In the meantime, interim disposal sites are being established to allow landholders to dispose of contaminated soil themselves. Every couple of years, Colorado’s health department transports the waste from these sites to the Grand Junction Disposal Site, but this practice cannot continue forever.

Aftermath

Grand Junction has managed to turn this irritating process into something positive. After the Department of Energy finished its cleanup of the uranium tailings dumped along the banks of the Colorado River, where Hispanic sugar beet workers once lived, it transferred the site to the city of Grand Junction. It has now become Las Colonias Park, where an amphitheater has become a local cultural hub and the Western Colorado Botanical Gardens are a testament to life’s vitality. One of the Botanical Garden’s exhibits is an old uranium cart, reminding us of what was once there. In 2016, Second Lieutenant Philip Leahy’s cabin was listed on the National Register of Historic Places for its role in the Manhattan Project, and it now stands as the Atomic Legacy Cabin on 2591 Legacy Way. In 1989, three of the remaining four buildings at the Climax Uranium Mill were demolished over safety concerns. The only building deemed safe was the original warehouse from the sugar beet plant. After being cleaned, the warehouse was sold to the private sector, and it now serves as a records storage facility operated by Vital Records.

This once proud building now stands alone, and its history is unknown to most. But this small structure once delivered Colorado’s citizens when they were hopeless, and led the charge into the Manhattan Project and beyond. Although few realize it, the places and names surrounding this brick building are a testament to the accomplishments of Riverside Parkway’s old warehouse.