Essexville: where Michigan's sugar industry was born

Every bag of Pioneer Sugar in a Michigan pantry traces back to Essexville. In 1898, the Pioneer Michigan Sugar Company fired up the state’s first successful beet-sugar factory here, with Governor Hazen Pingree on hand to launch the inaugural “campaign” — the industry’s word for the round-the-clock fall processing season. That first year, area farmers delivered some 32,000 tons of sugar beets, and an industry was born: within a decade, factories had sprung up across the Saginaw Valley and the Thumb.

More than 125 years later, sugar is still a local crop and a local company. Michigan Sugar, the grower-owned cooperative headquartered next door in Bay City, ranks among the largest beet-sugar producers in the country, and its Pioneer brand keeps the Essexville original’s name alive. The flat, rich farmland around Essexville and Hampton Township still grows beets, and if you smell something warm and faintly sweet on an October night, that’s the campaign running — the oldest industrial tradition in the county, still going.