The Hanover Canal System, an irrigation project funded by J.W. Pulliam and his family, was completed in the Big Horn Basin in 1905 and brought settlers to Worland. Soon after the project, which included the Big Horn Canal, Pulliam planted 600 acres of sugar beets and grain as a pilot project, the first planting of sugar beets in the Big Horn Basin. By 1909, area growers were under contract to cultivate sugar beets that were shipped by rail to Billings, Montana. In 1916, the Wyoming Sugar Company of Ogden, Utah, announced plans to build a beet sugar factory in Worland, and 150 men completed the $1 million factory in one year despite concerns about railroad delays and a shortage of cars. Company president J.M. Eccles opened the factory on October 17, 1917, and on its first day of operation it sliced 260 tons of beets. Workers lived in company-built row houses and, known as sugar tramps, were mostly young Mormons along with families from Japan, Russia, Germany, and Mexico. Holly Sugar Corporation acquired the Worland factory in 1925, and by 1939 its beet receiving station could handle more than 70,000 tons of beets, making it the largest in the world at the time. Sugar beets were first topped by hand, but machine harvesting replaced that work in the 1950s and 1960s. After Holly Sugar Corporation announced in 2001 that the factory would close, growers, landowners, and business people in the Big Horn Basin and Fremont County formed a cooperative to buy it, and under the new cooperative's management it was renamed the Wyoming Sugar Company in 2002.