In August 1903, Mark Austin negotiated the purchase of a section of land here, with the south half to be used as the town site and the north half, about 1/2 mile northeast, for a sugar beet factory for the Fremont County Sugar Company. By October 1903, E.H. Dyer had contracted to build the $750,000 factory, and early in 1904 the company signed an additional contract with Dyer for an auxiliary plant at Parker, bringing the total to nearly $1 million. On December 8, 1903, President Joseph F. Smith, elected president of the company, laid the cornerstone of the factory, which processed 35,000 tons of beets the next fall. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints sent 3 chemists from Germany to teach the people how to make sugar. Growing beets required very hard labor: planting, cultivating, and digging were done with horses, but thinning, weeding, irrigating, toping, and loading were done by hand by the farmer and his family. In 1906 the company paid laborers and growers $3/4 million. The town grew and 20 businesses flourished here. At the slicer in Parker, beet juice was extracted and pumped almost 6 miles away through a pipeline to the factory in Sugar City. The slicer was closed in 1913 because of difficulties caused by extremely cold weather, which froze juice in the pipeline and froze water and beets in the flume. Because of limitations of acreage and labor, the factory was closed in 1940 and 1941, reopened for the last campaign in 1942, and dismantled in 1947.