A story from Hawaii Public Radio, reprinted at KQED Public Media, describes the final days of the cane sugar industry in Hawaii (on Maui). After decades of the TV jingle for C&H Sugar, singing the praises of "pure cane sugar from Hawaii", the iconic crop has fallen victim to global competition. There will be no more Maui sugar cane harvest after 2016 - Hawaiian Commercial & Sugar (HC&S) will move on to other crops. The fate of the shipping destination for that sugar - the equally iconic C&H plant in Crockett, California, is equally uncertain.
What does all this have to do with Santa Cruz County? Glad you asked - HC&S was founded in the 1890s by a partnership including "Sugar King" Claus Spreckels, the same Spreckels who once owned over 2,000 acres of today's Aptos. That purchase was made in 1874, when Spreckels was working to develop California-grown sugar beets as a competitor to tropics-loving cane. He knew that Hawaiian growers faced a big disadvantage in the cost of shipping their products to the mainland. That is still true today, and is one of the main reasons, along with lower-cost labor in other countries, that Hawaiian sugar is no longer cost-competitive.
Spreckels was, in one respect, the Donald Trump of his era - he liked to put his name on things. In Hawaii, he established Spreckelsville as headquarters for his operations. Here in California, he built the company town of Spreckels just east of Salinas, in Monterey County. Company operations moved there in 1899, closing the older plant in Watsonville. The sugar king and his resort hotel development are remembered in the Aptos area in a number of street and place names: Spreckels Drive, Claus Court, Polo Drive, and Deer Park.
There is irony in the fact that C&H Sugar began as a reaction by Hawaiian sugar plantation owners against mainland investors like Spreckels who tried to dominate the industry. Now, at the end of the Hawaiian sugar era, the old rivals decline together.
