Unearthing the Sugar Beet Generation

A hundred years ago this month, a three-story brick factory with twin 150-foot high smokestacks stood ready for the first sugar beet crop ever taken from the Oxnard Plain.

The scruffy town site of Oxnard lay half a mile away, around present-day Plaza Park, its flea-ridden roads covered with straw to fill potholes and keep the dust down.

The community had been thrown together in a matter of months; a year earlier, most of Oxnard had consisted of lima bean fields.

A century later, the founding of Ventura County’s largest city has passed virtually unnoticed. There have been no parades, no ceremonies, no beet festivals to mark the date and the crop that gave Oxnard its start.

Indeed, few people are aware of the significance of the year 1898, even those with lengthy roots in the area.

Oxnard Councilman Dean Maulhardt, who traces his lineage to Jacob Maulhardt, the man generally credited with luring the beet factory to Oxnard in the first place, had difficulty pinpointing the date’s importance when quizzed.

“What is the significance?” he said after several guesses. “In 1898, I think something was established here.”

Indeed. Oxnard was not incorporated until 1903, the date most people associate with Oxnard’s beginning. But 1898 marked the real birth of the city, said local historian Jeff Maulhardt, Dean’s cousin. Next year, he will publish “The First Farmers of the Oxnard Plain,” the initial book in a planned three-volume series of the city’s history.

“That’s when the town was laid out,” he said. “That’s when the sugar beet factory was completed. And that was a whole new era for the Oxnard Plain.”

Oxnard’s roots actually can be traced as far back as 1896, when local farmers began experimenting with sugar beets as an alternative to lima beans, said Jeff Maulhardt. Overproduction had caused lima bean prices to drop.

The man behind the experimental crop was Jacob Maulhardt, whose partner was John Borchard. Jacob Maulhardt financed the efforts of his nephew, Albert Maulhardt, to popularize sugar beets among local farmers, said Jeff Maulhardt, the great-great-grandson of both Jacob and his partner Borchard.

Along with Jacob’s brother, Gottfried, the partners owned a combined 1,200 acres of land in the area where St. John’s Regional Medical Center, Wal-Mart and other big-box stores now sit. An uncle of Jeff Maulhardt’s still farms the remaining 110 acres today.

Experimental plantings that showed the sugar content of Oxnard Plain beets was much higher than that of beets grown elsewhere attracted the attention of Henry T. Oxnard and his brother James. They owned three beet-processing plants, including one in Chino.

In 1897, the brothers proposed building a $2-million factory that would employ 500 people. In return, they asked for concessions that included 100 acres of land for a plant site and commitments from farmers to grow 20,000 acres of beets for five years.

“This is a golden opportunity to secure by far the biggest and most important enterprise that has ever been offered to Ventura County, and dull indeed will be our citizens if all the conditions are not promptly and cheerfully complied with,” wrote a Ventura newspaper in October 1897.

Construction of what would become the second-largest sugar beet factory in the nation got underway the next month with a crew of about 200 men.

The beginnings of a new settlement quickly arose on the plain.

In her 1989 book, “A Tower in the Valley--A History of Santa Clara Parish,” Catherine Mervyn wrote that the living was “free and easy” and “morals loose” in the “no-name city” of adobes, saloons and whorehouses that popped up virtually overnight.

“County sheriffs had a hard time keeping tabs on brawls that swept the area,” wrote Mervyn, by coincidence Jeff Maulhardt’s fourth-grade teacher.

Development progressed rapidly.

On Jan. 21, 1898, Oxnard was officially christened, apparently after a meeting of local officials who decided on the name in the Oxnard brothers’ absence.

In March, Oxnard’s streets were laid out and the migration was on as houses and other buildings began to be moved from such surrounding communities as Saticoy and Hueneme.

“Inside of six months it has become a bustling town of several hundred people with hotels, restaurants, general merchandising stores, etc., and has all the modern conveniences of older towns,” wrote a Ventura newspaper later that year.

Nevermind that the town’s first post office opened in April--with no stamps for sale--or that in May loose livestock were reported to be creating havoc in the town and newly planted beet fields.

In the spring of 1898, Oxnard was dubbed a boom town, a status boosted by the arrival of the railroad that same year.

“Oxnard’s goal is to be the largest possible Ventura County town in the shortest possible time,” reported a Ventura newspaper in January 1899.

Oxnard’s growth had grave repercussions for surrounding communities, particularly Hueneme, which never recovered from the sudden emergence of its neighbor and for a time became a virtual “ghost town,” according to local historians.

The beet factory itself lasted until 1958, when it was shut down after 60 years of continuous operation, Jeff Maulhardt said.

A consortium of investors, including local businessman Martin “Bud” Smith, purchased the 124-acre tract in 1959 and built an industrial park on the site.

Despite the importance of the year 1898, Dean Maulhardt said Oxnard’s centennial will be officially celebrated in 2003.

“You can only have so many 100-year anniversaries,” he said. “In my mind that’s really 2003--that’s the 100-year incorporation of the city.”

Oxnard was incorporated in 1903 in an effort to gain control of the 17 saloons that kept its 2,200 residents, including 700 beet factory workers, well lubricated around the clock. While the city was incorporated to stop excessive carousing, Maulhardt says he hopes the coming centennial turns back the clock, albeit in a more conservative way.

“I’m looking for a big party,” Maulhardt said.