(mellow guitar music) - Crookston is the logical place to have a museum, 'cause this is the first place that sugar beets were raised in the Red River Valley.

In 1918, a guy from Michigan moved here and he'd raised sugar beets in Michigan.

He brought some seed along and he planted it in a garden up on the north edge of Crookston.

And from there it's gone to hundreds of thousands of acres in the Red River Valley.

Well, we've got lots of beet harvesters.

We've gone all the way up to Alvarado and down to Kendra to get machines, and then we restored 'em back here in the shop and painted 'em.

After the First World War, there was such a shortage of labor that the government set up a commission of some sort, and they gave out grants to machinery companies to develop something that would harvest the beets without so much labor.

And this one behind me is a McCormick Deering one-row lifter.

And that was one of the first ones to come out and became the most popular, at least in the Valley.

It topped, lifted and cleaned the beets.

Then they went up an elevator and got dropped onto a moving conveyor belt on a cart.

And two people stood on that and picked the beets out of the mud and dropped 'em down into the cart and the mud fell off the back of the conveyor belt.

I got a whole display along the wall here that's got all kinds of stuff from cameras to telephones to photographs.

Yeah, we've got the beet knives here, like this, to pick the beets up off the ground.

Grabbed 'em with their left hand, cut the tops off.

They'd use a fork like that.

Beet fork looks like a potato fork, but it has knobs on the tips cause you're shoveling up off the ground, and that'd help them from digging into the ground.

One thing that we've looked for for years is a guy that had a welding shop in town here by the name of AOSP.

He took Model Ts and put big steel wheels on the back and made a beet cultivator out of them.

That was the first power-driven cultivator.

I've walked through many, many tree rows and have not been able to find them.

We plant about two acres of beets here every year and then harvest them on a Sunday afternoon in September.

Usually get four or 500 people that show up.

So we'll have tractor pulling contests, wheat threshing with a steam engine, and also harvesting sugar beets out here, all on that second weekend in September.

This fellow that moved here from Michigan and raised the first beets, he dug 'em by hand from his garden and put 'em in gunnysacks and shipped them down to Chaska, Minnesota to the beet factory there.

And they wrote back to him that they have good quality and look good, plant some more the next year, so he did.

And then the Northwest Experiment Station out here, it's UMC now, just about right away they started researching them, and then Minnesota Beet Company got interested and they decided that they'd built a factory up here and it eventually became American Crystal, And from there it's history.

(mellow guitar music)