Sugar centennial celebration Saturday

WORLAND – One hundred years is a milestone that not many businesses reach. One can only wonder if in 1916 when the Wyoming Sugar Company of Ogden, Utah, decided to build the sugar factory in Worland, if they dreamed that the factory would still be going and going strong, 100 years later. To celebrate such a rare milestone, on Saturday, the Worland community is rallying together to give Wyoming Sugar the celebration that 100 years deserves.

The Washakie County Museum and Cultural Center has an exhibit opening at 9 a.m. on Saturday honoring Wyoming Sugar and all that it has gone through in the last 100 years. “We are doing an exhibit to celebrate 100 years of Wyoming Sugar in Worland. The exhibit looks at it from its first construction and then goes through some major world events and how that affected it. Sugar rations during World War I and World War II, how prohibition affected it. The exhibit goes into some of the science of how you go from sugar beet to sugar and the kind of lab equipment that they use. It gives an overview of some of the big changes that have happened in the sugar industry here in Worland,” Washakie Museum and Cultural Center Curator Rebecca Brower said. The exhibit will be on display until Oct. 28.

Worland Friday Fest Merchants are holding their annual Harvest Fest dedicated to the Wyoming Sugar Company and its 100th birthday. Friday Fest Merchant member Deb Larkins stated that the official title of this year’s Harvest Fest is: Harvest Fest 2017 celebrating 100 years of Wyoming Sugar. She said that events for the Harvest Fest begin at 9 a.m. Saturday with sidewalk sales and vendors located on main street (Big Horn Avenue). A horseshoe contest will be held in the morning in the vacant lot behind Kings Carpet and a corn hole contest will be held in the afternoon on Eighth street, of which a portion will be closed to traffic for the event.

The Farmers Market Saturday will have a Wyoming Sugar themed market and will be staying open past the normal closing time of 11:30 a.m. Cotton candy made with Wyoming Sugar will be available. The Farmers Market will stay open beyond the usual closing time, staying open as long as foot traffic merits it, Farmers Market Director Dee Murray said. “Last year during Harvest Fest we stayed open until 1:30-2 p.m.,” she added.

FREE BBQ

Wyoming Sugar will be celebrating by having a free community barbecue from 11 a.m. – 2 p.m. Before and during the barbecue, participants will be able to look at beet farming machinery, antique through modern day machinery. A short video, about eight minutes, will also be available for barbecue goers to learn about the transformation from sugar beet seed to sugar.

“This is going to be for our growers, our employees, old growers, old employees and the whole community. The whole community because the community has been a part. I would bet that a good portion of the people of this town at one time did something at the factory,” Wyoming Sugar President and CEO Mike Greear said.

A golf tournament put together by a couple Wyoming Sugar Board members’ wives will be held after the barbecue at the Green Hills Golf Course.

Wyoming Sugar is also sponsoring a sugar beet decorating contest. Wyoming Sugar’s Joan Hall said, “We are promoting sugar beet decorating, so we have approximately 100 fifth-graders that are going to be taking sugar beets home to decorate and we are going to have a committee that’s going to judge them. We will have that probably Thursday, we would like to have those [decorated sugar beets] on display for the picnic. Maybe we will have a people’s choice award or something like that, where people can take a look and vote. We want them all to be decorated with all natural ingredients, like other vegetables or leaves or rocks or something like that and not artificial things. That should be fun, we haven’t done that for several years and some of the kids are pretty imaginative.”